


So Late Into The Night

by Unsentimentalf



Series: One Small Change [5]
Category: Blake's 7
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-08-21
Packaged: 2020-05-20 08:52:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19373353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unsentimentalf/pseuds/Unsentimentalf
Summary: "You, me, Avon - the press will have a field day.”“We're old and boring,” Blake said without much conviction. “A three day wonder at the most. There are voters now who were born after the Revolution. What do they care about our personal relationships?”





	1. Chapter 1

"List news highlights."

Tarrant sat down with his coffee at the kitchen table and only then glanced at the screen. 

"What the hell!" he said aloud to the empty room.

The vid screen was set to prioritise any items to do with Blake, but these days he was seldom more than an incidental feature. Civil servants tried to stay out of the news as much as politicians courted it. 

As for Tarrant himself, he couldn't imagine why any news reporter would be interested in his doings right now. He was retired from public life, just a part-time pilot and amateur speed racer, and sadly he hadn't won anything particularly impressive recently. Too many younger pilots with faster reflexes. He'd have to swallow his pride and start competing in the over 40s age group if he really wanted more trophies. 

But a report featuring him, Blake _and_ Avon? Tarrant's first thought was that something terrible had happened to Liberator. He glanced at his comm. No messages, from Blake or the ship.

"Play top item."

 

It was only a minute or so long but it must have taken months to put together. They’d used spy drones; they’d deny it, of course, but he’d picked up quite a bit about surveillance over the years and there were shots they could never have taken via legitimate public access.

Suing them to hell and back wouldn’t change the fact that he’d been careless. Careless off the ship, with no reason for it except that he’d assumed no-one would be watching. Nothing outright damning, at least, but whoever had compiled it had known what they were looking for and had found enough indiscreet moments (almost all his) to tell a unmistakeable and painfully conventional story. 

He’d intended to go to the racetrack after breakfast. Now he wasn’t sure where to go. Blake would be busy until lunchtime- he couldn’t pull him out of meetings for this. Liberator was far away and he definitely couldn’t pull her back. As he sipped his coffee and stared at the damming screen, his wrist comm beeped. 

_I’ve got something stronger than coffee if you need it_

Vila. A short walk away and although the idea of pouring out his troubles to the ex-thief was somewhat uncomfortable, at least Vila hadn’t just learned something he didn’t previously know.

_Coffee will have to do. Make it strong._

It wasn’t fair, of course. He strode through the near empty streets and if anyone recognised him they didn’t let him know. No-one should care about his private life. It was about Blake, of course. It was always Blake. Even when he’d been Commander of the Federation Military people had watched him, waited for a misstep, because he was Blake’s husband. Fifteen years in the public eye and he’d thought he was used to it, but he’d taken his eye off the ball and now this.

The coffee was rich. Vila never lacked for off-world luxuries. He’d settled on Frais around the same time as they had, but like Tarrant he spent a significant amount of his time on Liberator. Unlike Tarrant he didn’t generally bother doing any visible work in either location. Where his money came from was a small mystery which none of the rest of them had any intention of trying to solve. 

“Want to talk about it?” he asked, offering some rather nice candies. Tarrant found that he was eating a handful without really being aware of taking them 

“I can’t. Sorry, Vila, I appreciate the offer, but I haven’t even talked to Blake yet.”

“You’re not worried about that, are you? He won’t be unkind about it.”

“I know that. But it’s more trouble for him. I don’t know what to do.”

“Tell them all to go to hell,” Vila suggested with more than usual vehemence. “It’s not their business and it’s not what they think it is."

"It's exactly what they think it is." Tarrant said. "While Roj Blake had been diligently beavering away as chief administrator on Frais, his husband's been taking long 'business' trips on the most luxurious ship in the galaxy which happens to belong to the man he's screwing on the side." He glowered at Vila. "That's what they said, isn't it? Is there any part of it that isn't true?"

"Liberator's not the most luxurious ship in the galaxy," Vila protested. "Not even close. I was on a cruise liner once with six swimming pools and at least a dozen bars and real gold taps and exotic dancers. Liberator's got some nice sofas, admittedly, but it's not what I'd call luxury. More like comfortable, I'd say. Homely, maybe. Would you say homely?"

He caught Tarrant's expression and continued in a more subdued fashion. 'Anyway, you're all consenting adults. No one really believes in monogamy these days. The whole idea is so pre-Revolution, I think." 

"You might not have noticed, moving in the thoroughly sleazy circles that you do, but traditional morality is very much in fashion on Frais at the moment. And Blake's got his position because his allies think he's intelligent, reliable and, six months in jail aside, respectable as well as committed to the IS. His enemies will love to have evidence that proves otherwise."

His comm beeped, _Where are you?_

_With V._

_Stay there. I'll be over soon._

It was Blake's usual terse style when he was busy but Tarrant could have done with something a touch less business-like. Still he didn't deserve consolation, not today. He wished that Blake had rung him but it probably wouldn’t have been wise.

An hour later there was a brief knock at the front door. Tarrant hung around in the hallway while Vila ushered the security guards into the kitchen and promised them drinks. As a senior civil servant in the Independent Systems administration Blake wouldn’t normally rate security. As the leader of the Revolution and ex-president of the Republic he would never be safe without it.

The freedom from guards was one of the reasons why Blake enjoyed his occasional excursions on the Liberator so much. That and the company, of course.

They went back into the sitting room, Vila tactfully excusing himself to see to the drinks. Tarrant stood, momentarily not sure what to say, and Blake came forward to hug him. “It wasn't your fault.”

“Of course it was. In every way possible. And you know what they are going to be like. You, me, Avon - the press will have a field day.”

“We're old and boring,” Blake said without much conviction. “A three day wonder at the most. There are voters now who were born after the Revolution. What do they care about our personal relationships?”

“We agreed if this caused any problems at all for you it would stop. “

“You said that. I never agreed to it.” Blake said. “We'll ride it out. We'll just tell then we've got an open marriage.”

“You've been scrutinised more closely than anyone else in the Galaxy for the last 15 years. No one's going to believe you've been in an open relationship all this time. It sounds like the weak attempt at a get-out that it is.”

“So we'll tell them the truth.” 

“They already know the truth,” Tarrant said harshly. “They’ve just told everyone the truth. The only thing they don't know is that you've known that your oldest friend is fucking your husband all alomg. Telling then that isn't going to improve anyone's opinion of any of us.” 

He sighed. “You can't spin this one, Roj. It was a mistake from the start.” 

“It was not a mistake,” Blake said forcefully, holding him at arm’s length so he could look into Tarrant’s face. “It's what you both needed and it still is, and I will not have you abandoning him over snide gossip. When's he due back?”

“Twenty-five days,” Tarrant said. “The ship's in the middle of a complex time critical trading scheme. Liberator can't come back here earlier without making a lot of customers very unhappy.”

Blake grimaced. “That's a lot of daily 'no comment's’ but we can't say anything until we've spoken to him. Any chance of getting him to leave the ship and meet us somewhere?”

“Us? You can't just walk out of the office, surely?”

“I'm owed about three years holiday and the gutter press are harassing my husband. I can certainly walk out if there's somewhere I need to be.” 

He kissed Tarrant briefly. “I haven’t changed my mind about this just because people now know. I'm not a hypocrite. But you are clearly going to be miserable until it's sorted, which makes it my top priority. Can you get a message to Liberator and see what can be arranged?” 

“I suppose I can try,” Tarrant conceded.

 

“Well now. Haven’t you been a fool?”

“It’s always a delight to speak to you as well, Avon.” Tarrant said with some irritation. “Blake wants to meet up and talk.”

“I’m busy.”

“Liberator is busy. Liberator also has Dayna. You’re barely 100 lightyears from Frais, you've got fast personal transport and so have we. You can find half a day spare to meet us.”

“Is that an order, Commander?”

“It’s a request from Blake, who, I might remind you, is the one with most to lose from all of this. I'd be personally grateful, Avon, if you could co-operate.”

“Personally grateful? What good do you expect me to do? You can deny everything, which will convince no-one, or admit everything which will make your husband a laughing stock, or shut up and hope the whole thing will go away, which it will eventually. I don’t intend to make any sort of public statement on the matter and I can’t see how it would help you if I did.”

Tarrant didn’t see how it would help either. “Blake doesn’t want to say anything publicly until he’s talked to you. We’re not going to ask you to commit yourself to doing anything. Just a short meeting, please.”

“We, is it?”

Tarrant briefly closed his eyes. He could do without this right now. “I told you. Blake’s the one with most to lose. He’s also my husband. If you think I’m going to do anything but put his interests first and foremost you’re the fool, Kerr.”

“Not for a moment,” Avon said coldly. “I’ll see what I can do. Out.”

 

“Avon’s sent rendezvous details for tomorrow. Seems that he wants this done as much as we do.”

Blake nodded. “How was he when you spoke?”

“It could have gone better,” Tarrant admitted. “These days I never know whether I’m talking to the hard as nails Avon or the ludicrously thin-skinned one.”

“It’s not easy for him,” Blake said. “He gets so little of you and he can’t even admit that he might want more.”

“The whole thing was a mistake,” Tarrant insisted. “It was just self-indulgent of me. I don’t need anyone but you.”

“I don’t agree.” Blake said. “Maybe it just needs a little tweaking.”

It was a bit late for tweaking, Tarrant thought. It needed killing off completely, for Blake’s sake. The thought was more than a little painful but that was his fault for getting involved at all. He wasn’t going to let his subversive feelings about another man stand in the way of Blake’s best interests, not any more.

 

It had been nearly 20 years since Tarrant had first seen Avon’s racer. It had been upgraded and refurbished a few times since and was still a lovely little ship. He manoeuvred their own personal transport into docking with it, a job always left to the most experienced of the two pilots. Avon never argued about that, at least. 

“Docking complete,” he said over the comm. “You can come over now.”

“Confirmed,” Avon said, sounding rather Zen-like. A few minutes later he was squeezed into their small cabin, perched on the pull-down seat.

“Well?” he said to Blake. He’d barely glanced at Tarrant.

“I have a proposal for you,” Blake said calmly.

“What sort of proposal?” 

“The traditional sort.”

Avon shook his head. “What, exactly?”

“Marriage.” Blake said.

Avon’s head snapped round to Tarrant. “I assume from your expression that he didn’t bother telling you about this.”

“No, he didn’t!” Tarrant said. “And it’s ludicrous. What the hell are you thinking, Blake? You can’t marry a man you’ve never even kissed! Also you’re already married, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“You’ve certainly kissed him,” Blake said cheerfully. “And a great deal more. A three-way marriage is both legal and respectable in most of the Independent Systems. What we do or don’t do within it is our own affair.”

“This is your solution to the gossip?” Tarrant demanded. “Don’t you think it’s a touch overkill? And incidentally, I don’t think I want to be married to Avon!”

“Who also doesn’t want to be married to either of you!” Avon said. “Not at all incidentally.”

“I didn’t expect either of you to take to the idea straight away,” Blake said comfortably. “I think you’ll come round when you see all the advantages.”

“Liberator!” Avon said. “You want my ship. That’s it.”

“That’s not it.” Blake corrected. “Yes, I’d love to have a share in her again but If you chose otherwise of course we’d sign an independent assets declaration.”

Avon scowled at him. “So what is it? What’s in this for you?”

“I’m tired of the current set-up,” Blake said. “I was a revolutionary, then a politician and now I’m an advisor and implementer of other people’s decisions. I wait for Tarrant to come home and tell me what you've all been up to, and then all too soon he goes away again. I’ve had enough of being the one waiting.”

“You don’t need to marry anyone to solve that!” Tarrant protested. “Just come! You’re always welcome, you know that.”

“I know.” Blake said. “But how often do you sleep with Avon when I’m on board?”

“I don’t,” Tarrant said. "And you know I wouldn't."

“So, I can’t just come along permanently. Not until something changes.”

“You don’t want to marry him,” Tarrant said in startled realisation. “You want me to marry him! You can’t propose on my behalf, Roj!”

“This is beyond ridiculous.” Avon stood up abruptly and the folding chair slammed up against the side of the cabin. “I have better things to do that this.” He stalked out towards the docking lock.

“Go with him,” Blake said.

“What? No!” 

“Please. Just talk to him. You two need to talk about this more than I do.“

Tarrant had at this point plenty of things that he wanted to say to Blake and none at all to Avon, but Blake’s face was at his most pleading. He sighed.

“Don’t expect me to take your side,” he said. “Not in this. Avon’s right, it’s ridiculous.”

“Just talk to him,” Blake said. “I’ll speak to Liberator over the comm when I get home.” 

 

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Avon was standing in the tiny hatch, blocking it.

“Following his instructions, as usual.” Tarrant said. “But I would honestly prefer to be doing something useful on the ship rather than being chased by news drones on Frais at the moment.”

“You let him boss you around far too much,” Avon said, but he moved aside.

Tarrant dozed on the long flight back to Liberator, since he’d got little sleep the night before and Avon clearly wasn’t in the mood for talking.

“Tarrant!” Dayna seemed pleased to see him. “I’m sorry about the trouble.”

“It’s nothing,“ Tarrant said, smiling. Here, in the place associated with so many real crises and dangers, the gossip really did seem like nothing. Why hadn’t he just laughed it off and got Blake to do the same?

Avon didn’t say anything.

 

By late the following day Tarrant had got some sleep, taken a shuttle down to a planet to sort out stray paperwork relating to a spice consignment, played cards with Dayna while waiting for the containers to be shuttled up to the ship, flown out of the system and optimised Dayna's proposed course to the next (tactfully, of course), had a couple of brief calls with Blake who seemed fine, if busy and generally settled back into his usual shipboard routine, with one exception. When he’d knocked on Avon’s door during their mutual off-shift there had been no response. 

So the man was pissed. Hardly surprising given Blake’s excruciatingly embarrassing interference. Tarrant would have told him, if he’d asked, that the casual sex he and Avon had indulged in for the last couple of years on the occasions when it was convenient did not add up to anything even remotely like a meaningful relationship, let alone a basis for marriage.

Blake didn’t understand sex without love, not really. He didn’t understand, even after all these years, how utterly shallow Tarrant was capable of being about sex with anyone else but him. And he didn’t understand that Tarrant would do anything to protect their marriage, even if it meant always keeping the other man he slept with at arm’s length, emotionally. Not that that had been difficult; Avon had made no more attempt at intimacy than he had. He supposed that they both had too much to lose and nothing at all to gain. 

By the fourth night, lying alone and contemplating the ceiling in the quarters he had shared with Blake for so many years, Tarrant had begun to see Blake's proposal as an act of misplaced generosity. Blake was always generous to him, always, only this time he’d tried to gift him Avon, who wasn’t either of theirs to give or take. 

 

"He was trying to be generous."

Tarrant had finally found Avon alone in the galley, finishing a sparse meal with his reader propped up in front of him. It wasn't an ideal venue but Tarrant was determined to talk.

"Of course." Avon said, "He's already given me his ship and his computer. His husband's obviously next. Anything else valuable likely to come my way? Maybe he could give me an interstellar empire. He seems to be good at collecting those."

Tarrant glared at him. There was more grey in the other man's hair than there had been, and more weight to his face. Tarrant couldn't remember right now how old the man was. A few years older than Blake, he thought, which would make him in his mid-fifties. Blake was right; even Tarrant should be too old by now to care about what the world thought. 

"Don't mock him," Tarrant said. "He was offering you something he thought you cared about. It was my mistake. I should have made him understand how little you still thought of me but I let him keep his romantic illusions. This is the result. You can blame me." He pulled out a chair across from Avon's lunch.

"I do." Avon said. 

"Well, I'm sorry, Honestly."

Avon eyed him. "You're not used to sleeping alone any more, are you? Blake at home, me here, always a warm bed and sex on demand. "

Tarrant tried not to wince." What do you expect me to say to that?"

"I wonder what Blake's plan is for sharing you, once we're married? Alternate nights, or will you flit between us at will, or maybe one very large bed? I suppose there's no point in asking. You won't have had your instructions yet."

"I get the message." Tarrant snapped. "You think he was stupid, high handed and insulting, and I'm just plain stupid. Maybe you're right. But at least he's trying to find something that might work for all of us. What's your plan?"

"Plan for what?" Avon asked. "If you come to my bed and I'm in the mood I'll let you in. If you stop coming, you stop. I'm not going to beg Blake for the loan of his husband."

"He doesn't want you to have to beg! He asked you to marry us! And if you're too proud to share maybe you should have said so two years ago!"

"So your adultery is my fault?"

"No." Tarrant grimaced. "It's mine, of course. I should never have risked compromising my marriage."

"Your marriage was seriously compromised from the start," Avon told him. "You've spent twenty years trying to feel grateful for being given the opportunity to do what you're told. You support him and he's kind to you, when he had the time or inclination to pay you any attention at all. Of course he didn't mind that I kept you entertained when he had more important things to do."

Tarrant laughed, without much amusement. "I suppose it would be convenient if you could goad me into abandoning you, but you could at least try an argument that isn't twenty fucking years old to do it! Yes, Blake's a dreadful husband. He doesn't do his share of the cooking or the emotional support or the coming home on time. He forgets to ask me how my day has been, or if I want to follow him to wherever his principles take him next or what I might want to do when I get there. All the ordinary things in life that I might have liked to have got sacrificed to his Cause, one way or another. I don't care and I've never cared. There's absolutely nothing you can tell me about my marriage that I don't already know."

"And yet you didn't know he was planning to propose to someone else." Avon's voice was dry. "That seems to be a fairly major blind spot. "

"It wasn't 'somebody else'. It was you. You've been wedged in the middle of the two of us all along. I shouldn't have been at all surprised that he wanted to make it official."

"Careful," Avon said. "You'll talk yourself into believing he's right fairly soon and I'll have you proposing as well."

"You're the last person I'd allow anywhere close to Blake." Tarrant said. "You'd break his heart without compunction for the slightest gain, just as you would have let him die in the med unit."

"You underestimate him." Avon pushed his empty plate away. "Both of us. Blake's not vulnerable and I'm not malevolent. After two decades of manoeuvring round each other for our own purposes, his as well as mine, we've both long since grown sufficient armour to be neither interested in nor capable of hurting each other. You're the one who still has all the weak spots and the weapons."

"Weapons?"

"Of course. You could hurt Blake badly. You might, if you really tried, even hurt me, though I wouldn't recommend it. I might be remarkably vindictive in response."

Tarrant could believe that last part. "The only thing I need weapons for is to protect Blake. If that means having to give you up I'll do it."

He paused. He was fairly sure that he shouldn't say the next bit but he thought that maybe honesty counted for something. "I don't want to. I'll miss sex with you like crazy. But if Blake's idea can't work, I don't know what else would. I won't leave him miserable at home just so I can have fun with you up here."

Avon's expression had become unreadable. "When's he planning to move back in?"

"He won't." Tarrant said. "You know how stubborn he is. I could tell him I'm done with you for good and he still wouldn't. If he doesn't want to stay on Frais we'll have to find somewhere else to go. That's not exactly making me happy either."

"You mean that I'm going to be without a pilot?"

"You have Dayna."

"Dayna," Avon said with strong disapproval, "is going on maternity leave in four months’ time. I was relying on you to cover for her."

"She's pregnant? That's great!"

"Hardly." Avon said. "Though she seems pleased enough. I can't manage Liberator efficiently on my own. Cally might come but she's no pilot. I need you on board, and if that means Blake comes as well, you need to stop him playing the martyr, or the would-be relationship counsellor, or whatever it is he thinks he's doing."

Avon seemed a great deal more animated about the potential loss of his pilot than his lover, Tarrant noticed, but then he supposed that he was a great deal more replaceable in the one role than the other. 

"As soon as I work out how to do that I'll do it. The trouble is that he thinks we've been good for each other!"

"Now why would he think that?"

"Maybe because I can spend more than five minutes in your company without actually trying to kill you these days?"

"An astute observation." Avon pushed his chair away and stood. "Will I see you tonight?"

"I imagine so," Tarrant said, and didn't protest his leaving, Nothing had been settled but they'd both got plenty to think about. 

 

"We're talking." Tarrant said to the screen.

Both he and Blake knew that no communication via the ship was private from her owner. Avon might respect their privacy, or he might not. 

"Good," Blake said. "Just talking?"

"Avon called you a would-be relationship counsellor." Tarrant said.

"I've been called much worse," Blake said. "Shall I stop asking questions then?"

"Probably best. Things are all right up here. How about you?"

"Being pestered," Blake said. "And being tight-lipped. I thought they'd lose interest with neither of you around but instead they wanted to know if you'd left me."

Tarrant hissed. "I trust you told them to go to hell?"

"You're Liberator's alternate pilot. That's public knowledge. I didn't see any need to justify your absence."

"Do I need to come back?" Tarrant asked.

Blake shook his head. "I'm fine here. Just twenty days till the ship gets back- I can wait for all of you."

They turned to discussion of the ship's schedule. Tarrant had decided not to reveal Dayna's news until she talked to him about it. Avon shouldn't have mentioned it, but that was Avon. 

"Well, that's all the news I've got," Blake said finally. "And an early start tomorrow. Sleep well, love, whenever you end up getting to sleep."

"Love you too." Even if Avon was listening in.

 

Tarrant turned off the screen and sat for a moment, thinking over what Blake had said. His husband's jacket was still hanging off the back of the chair on Blake's side of their bed, a couple of tunics untidily stuffed in an open drawer. Tarrant usually tidied up Blake's stuff after a while but sometimes the reminders were comforting. 

He changed into the silks he usually slept in, patted Blake's jacket fondly and left the room. Avon's rooms were only a short walk further and this time the door slid open when he knocked.


	2. Chapter 2

_Avon! Are you there, Avon?_ Dayna's voice sounded anxious. 

"Not now," Tarrant hissed sotto voice.

Avon lifted his head. "Are we in trouble?" he asked in an impressively unflustered voice.

_Nothing like that. It's an urgent coded message from Cally, on Earth._

"Get Orac to decode it. Tarrant and I will be on the flight deck in thirty minutes. Avon out."

"We could make it fifteen," Tarrant said, slightly guiltily. 

"I don't care to be rushed."

He certainly didn't, Tarrant thought. They'd been in bed for all over an hour and only just reached what he considered the business part. Avon dipped his head down to kiss Tarrant underneath him, one of those rough, long kisses that seemed to catch the essence of their love making, if you could think of it as that. Around now Tarrant usually did. It was afterwards that the caution crept in. 

Caution didn't have time to creep in afterwards this time. He lay for just a few seconds with his head on Avon's chest, able to make out their fast, unsynchronised heartbeats before he shifted, reluctantly. "We'd better move."

"Yes." Avon pushed him off, not roughly, and went for his clothes.

"You did that to us once." Some of his own clothes had moved into Avon's wardrobe for just such contingencies.

"I did?"

"Your message sending us to Cephlon. Back when you were working with Servalan."

"Hardly an accurate description. I was entrapping her."

"You were entrapping all of us. Manipulative liar that you are. Anyway Blake shot out of bed the moment he heard your voice. I was pretty pissed off with you for that."

Avon laughed. "I wish I'd known that back then. Your jealousy was my most effective weapon by far."

Tarrant stopped momentarily, arm halfway into his cream shirt. "Were you really never remotely tempted?"

"By Blake? A little I suppose, long before Star One. Before I found out that the revolutionary fervour never got dialled down and that being ordered around was a definite turn off. By the time you came on the scene I was long over any lingering attraction, but it didn't take long to figure out which way your mind was going and prod it along a bit."

"And what about more recently?" He buckled up his belt. 

Avon swung his jacket across his shoulders. "Thinking about that very large bed?"

"I'm thinking about everything. Blake's solution isn't acceptable and you refuse to engage with the problem at all. That leaves it in my lap."

"I thought you didn't want me anywhere near your infinitely delicate husband?" Avon waited in the doorway for Tarrant to finish pulling on his boots. "Certainly not in bed with him."

"I'm not issuing an invitation." He caught up with Avon and they walked together down the corridor. "I just wanted to know whether you would."

"I don't do hypothetical sex," Avon said, "and I don't like being schemed at. Zen, tell Dayna we're on our way."

 

"Blake's deal is going to break down."

Cally was recording the message outside. Tarrant could see snow covered branches behind her.

"The anti-secessionists have allied behind the scenes with the President and her military commander. At the moment they are consolidating their position but soon they are going to start flexing their muscles and that means going for IndSys and Blake's deal. There will be protests on Earth but they are counting on Del's precedent to give them authorisation to repress them with force."

She paused to look behind her, then back to the camera. "They are coming after the dissident groups first. If they can drive us underground then the protests won't have organisers. Tell Blake."

The message ended.

"That shouldn't be happening!" Tarrant said in dismay.

"That's what happens when you disturb the stasis quo." Avon said. "Massive disequilibrium and instability. The only successful revolutions long term are the ones that crush dissent as soon as they take power. The others get swept aside by the next swing of the pendulum they set in motion."

Tarrant gave him an unimpressed look. "You're forgetting that Blake and I kept the Republic together for ten full years while you were on the run. There's literally nothing you can teach me about post-revolutionary politics. My point is that your pendulum is swinging too fast. Earth chose peace over war just two years ago. It hasn't had elections since. The deal hasn't significantly affected living standards back home. It should have held far longer than this."

Avon looked at him, then up at the blank screen. "You might be right." He sounded surprised.

"Remarkable. I can count the number of times you've ever said that on one hand. I need to talk to Blake. Can you get us an absolutely secure link?"

 

"You'll go after her."

Blake had been bleary-eyed when they'd woken him but by the time he'd watched Cally's message he was obviously fully alert.

"I think..." Tarrant started, and from behind him Avon said, "Yes".

"Good." Blake drew a hand across his eyes. "I need to consider what else we might do to strengthen pro-IndSys feeling on Earth. How long will it take you to get there?

"Three days, given our current loading. We’re hauling like an ore freighter right now."

"What about if you dump your cargo?"

There was a hrrmph in Tarrant's ear. He ignored it. "Knock half a day off."

"And if you picked me up?"

Tarrant closed his eyes for a second, visualising a 3D star map and intersecting paths. "You're not anywhere near the right direction. Even if you set off right now it will add over twelve hours to Earth."

"That's too long," Blake said reluctantly. "And I need to talk to people here about this before I go anywhere. You'll have to get Cally without me. She's the expert on Earth politics these days anyway. She'll know if there's anything useful you can do."

"What we can do is pick her up and get out of there," Avon said. "My ship's not getting involved in another civil war on your behalf, Blake. You've got nothing to bribe me with this time."

"Just get to Earth for now," Blake told Tarrant. "We'll worry about the rest when you're on your way. If there's nothing else I'll speak to you later."

As the screen blanked, Tarrant swung his chair round to face Avon, waiting for the inevitable reaction.

"It's not his ship," Avon said. “He can't run between IndSys and Earth trying to make both of them dance to his tune."

"He was President for a decade," Tarrant pointed out. "Earth matters to him still."

"But he doesn't matter to Earth. At best he's a turncoat, at worst an irrelevance. Not even the ones who support the deal with IndSys like Blake much. Or you, come to that. "

He smiled grimly at Tarrant. "Few people have forgiven you for declaring martial law, particularly those politicians you imprisoned who ended up in government. If you think you're going to drop in and lead another popular revolution you can think again. We get Cally, we leave, no-one even knows we were there. "

"I'm surprised you're willing to do that much." Tarrant said.

"If you would be more comfortable with a self-serving reason, Cally knows a great deal about Liberator's operations. I don't want Earth interrogators finding out about our camouflage. It might not be at the forefront of their interrogation but they'll get around to it eventually. "

"So do we drop the cargo?"

"We tag and drop it. I've got two supposedly competent pilots who ought to be able to find it again."

"We'll get that started," Tarrant said, standing up. 

He didn't want to move onto the conversation about what would happen when Blake's decisions ran up against Avon's orders on Avon's ship. The man had usually complied with Blake's occasional requests for use of Liberator in exchange for having Frais available as a home port with associated trading and docking privileges. As for Tarrant, he generally flew the ship in accordance with Avon's instructions without much concern as to where. All that could change.

 

"You've been remarkably quiet," he said to Dayna, who was walking with him to pick up the short range beacon from Liberator's stores.

"Is there any point in my saying anything?" she retorted. "Neither of you will listen."

"So you think he's wrong, then?"

"No, I think he's right. Earth's long past the stage where you and Blake can help it. Last time you tried a grand intervention they put you in jail. If they go to war with the systems Liberator won't be on either side."

"Yet IndSys will be fighting with weapon designs that you sold them?"

"Against a military machine that you developed, Del Tarrant! Don't play moralist with me! You had ten years to break Earth's forces down into something that couldn't threaten its neighbours and you chose instead to make those forces more efficient and well armed! I'm surprised they tolerate you on Frais at all."

Some of them didn’t. "I was doing my job," Tarrant said, aggrieved. "Remember the alien invasion? I fought in that. We could have lost humanity in a day. I couldn't destroy the Galaxy's only significant defence. And the Republic was non-aggressive until the systems seceded."

"But it isn't any more. Here we are."

Dayna went to pick up the heavy cone shaped beacon.

"Let me take that," Tarrant suggested.

"I'm pregnant, not ill!"

"Congratulations on that, by the way," Tarrant said. "But if you need a hand..."

"I'm fine." She hefted the beacon up into her arms. "I always thought you and Blake might want children."

Tarrant sighed a little. "Never the time. And we'd probably have made lousy parents. I think we were always enough for each other."

Dayna started back down the corridor. "You were enough for Blake, anyway."

She spoke again into the sudden silence. “Sorry. Not my business.”

“It’s what everyone’s thinking,” Tarrant said. “That I’ve betrayed him for nothing.”

“Avon doesn’t think it’s nothing.”

“He doesn’t think it’s important.”

“Oh, he does. You can take this now."

Tarrant lifted the weight, noting that they were exactly halfway to the cargo bay. 

Dayna continued, “Six months ago he declined a very profitable contract because it would mean picking you up four days late. I have to put up with a week of bad temper every time you leave. He generally manages to mention his ‘other pilot’ two or three times a day. I’d be offended if I didn’t know it had nothing to do with your supposedly superior flying skills.”

Tarrant stopped abruptly in the corridor. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure! I’ve had two years of listening to him talk about you! He tries to make it all sardonic and critical but the mask slips all the time.”

“Not when I’m here, it doesn’t.” Tarrant said. 

“He tries harder then. He really doesn’t want you to know. After all, you’re not going to leave Blake for him. He doesn’t want you to dump him because he’s become too involved.”

Tarrant started walking again. “So why are you telling me now?”

“You’re obviously trying to decide what to do. I guessed that you maybe really didn’t have a clue.”

Tarrant thought about the way that Avon kissed him. He supposed that he had known, really, but it hadn’t been convenient to think about it. It was an unwanted complication given that all that should matter to him was Blake, but he couldn’t help the selfish stab of pleasure at the thought.

When he got back to the flight deck however Avon looked just as much besotted with him as he ever did, i.e. not in the slightest. “Are you done?”

“All jettisoned. The beacon should be detectable from a hundred thousand spacials. With that and the course information we should be able to find it again for up to a year or so.”

“So why aren’t we moving?”

“Because you just interrupted me.” Tarrant swept his hand across the pilot’s console and it lit up with everything he might need. “Zen, set course to Earth, standard by eleven.”

“Confirmed.” 

“Now show me the whole course.” There would be places along the route where human experience beat alien planning. If he couldn’t pare several hours off Zen’s best guess it was time for him to retire. 

Dayna joined him after a while. By now she’d piloted Liberator for years more than he had. She’d never been through the Academy but she knew this part of the Galaxy and how her ship handled as well as he did and talking problems through with her was far more efficient than working them out on his own.

Avon supplied coffee at intervals and asked the occasional question but he mostly left his pilots to their work. Tarrant was barely aware of his presence, coming and going quietly behind them. 

"That will do," Tarrant said finally. "Fourteen hours on this course before we can contribute anything useful. We might as well all go off shift for a bit, get some food and see if Orac can pick up any relevant communications from Earth or Frais."

"I had something to eat earlier," Dayna said. "Rushing around on an empty stomach is not my idea of fun at the moment. If there's nothing urgent happening I'm going to get some sleep."

Avon nodded. "If there's a war brewing I want someone on the flight deck monitoring communications at all times. Six hour shifts with an hour overlap; I'll take the first, Tarrant second, which gives you ten hours till you're on again."

"Great. See you later."

Dayna did look somewhat tired, Tarrant thought. He was used to thinking of her as the young and perpetually energetic one, but she must be closer to 40 than 30 these days. 

"Can I get you some food?" he asked Avon. 

"I had some while you were doing your difficult sums. Go and eat before you fall over. A coffee in an hour or so wouldn't go amiss, if you're not sensible enough to be asleep by then."

Tarrant had had every intention of supplying coffee but he leaned back for a couple of minutes on one of Vila's homely sofas and was woken by a shake of his shoulder. 

"Thirty minutes to your shift starts. You might take a shower first."

Tarrant thought about pointing out that the sweat he'd previously worked up had been on Avon's behalf, but a shower and change of clothes didn't sound unreasonable.

He got back to the flight deck two minutes before his shift was due to start. "Any updates?"

"Nothing from Cally. Your husband called, rather pointlessly since he had nothing useful to say. Orac confirms Cally's analysis from what chatter it could pick up. Not much, of course, thanks to you."

When Tarrant had been under the impression that Avon had stolen Orac he'd put a great deal of work and resources into making Republic military communications secure against it. Avon still complained about it regularly. 

" OK." Tarrant pulled up the proposed course for the next few hours. "If that's the handover done, you don't need to stay." 

Alone on the flight deck, Tarrant took another look at the course and confirmed that no, there really was going to be nothing useful he could do there for the next few hours. He got Orac to tell him what it had told Avon but there was nothing that to his ear sounded useful. 

Blair had called when he was asleep. He thought of calling back but Blake, unlike him, was probably either engaged in something productive or sleeping. Avon would have told his husband when he'd be on shift, unless Avon was feeling particularly unhelpful, of course.

"Zen, play the last communication between Roj Blake and Kerr Avon."

Blake appeared on half the screen, Avon on the other half.

"Hello," Blake said, "How are things going?"

"I told you that we'd go to Earth, if that's what you were checking up on. Fifty four hours to Pluto orbit"

"Good." Blake said. "Thank you."

"It's not on your behalf."

"Thank you anyway. Is Tarrant about?"

"He's asleep on the sofa in the rec room. I'm not waking him just so you can exchange endearments. He's due to take a shift in a couple of hours and I need him rested."

"Our endearments always take second place to your operational requirements," Blake said cheerfully. "I'm not going to deprive you of him. I thought I made that clear."

Tarrant could see Avon freeze, just a little. "This again? I'm beginning to think you must be getting bored with him."

"You don't think anything of the sort," Blake retorted. "You're just uncharacteristically craven about discussing this. Have you come up with a justification for not marrying us yet?"

Tarrant winced. This was Blake in aggressive mood and he couldn't imagine Avon taking it lying down. He really shouldn't be listening to this conversation but he didn't tell Zen to turn it off.

"I don't need a justification." Avon said. "It was a thoroughly dishonest proposition."

"In what way?" Blake demanded. "I assure you that I have every intention of carrying it through."

"Only as far as the wedding night," Avon snarled. "You propose marriage with no intention of consummating it. That's not my definition of fair dealing."

Blake looked blank for a moment. "You want to sleep with me?"

"Of course not. But I sure as hell won't be taking anyone as husband who won't!"

Blake's lip curled. "Justification, and a pathetic one at that. I don't believe for a moment that you care a fig for traditional marriage customs and we both know this is not about your relationship with me."

"There's something quite disturbing about the way you push him at me," Avon said. "If you just didn't care when he slept around I could understand it, but you do care, don't you? Far too much. Does it get you hard to imagine him squirming naked underneath me?"

Tarrant was sure by now that he definitely shouldn't be listening to this conversation.

Blake was reddening slightly. "No. Not in the slightest. If this was about what I wanted then I'd keep him to myself and to hell with you! After all what have you ever done to deserve him?"

"So why don't you keep him?" Avon demanded. "It wouldn't be difficult. He does everything you tell him to, after all."

"Because he's got nothing on Frais except me and a bit of racing. He spearheaded the Revolution, he controlled the most powerful military force in the galaxy and now they come down on me quoting the restrictions in the peace accord if he's so much as overheard talking about the weather in public. It's Del; he can't stay at home and keep the house tidy! He needs something and that something turns out to be you and Liberator, so I'll be damned if I let him lose it, and you should be too."

"Don't assume that his ennui is any concern of mine. I'm not his therapist," Avon said coldly. "I just share a bed with him sometimes. Have you anything useful to say about the current Earth situation?"

"Nothing new."

"Then call back when you do. Liberator out."

The screen went blank. 

Tarrant would have preferred it if Blake hadn't been right. He was incredibly lucky to be married to the man he loved; he had no right or reason to be restless at home, and even if he were then there must be a thousand less destructive ways to keep himself occupied than Kerr Avon, who protected himself from anyone getting close with deliberate cruelty. 

 

It was towards the end of his shift that Zen announced “Incoming message from Roj Blake.”

"Hi love," Blake started. "Oh. What's wrong?"

Nothing for it. "I played your earlier call back. I thought it was operational stuff."

"Ah," Blake said, flatly. "Well, I'm sorry you had to hear it but I stand by every word. Have you spoken to Avon about it?"

"He's asleep."

"Will you?"

"What's the point? He'll stand by every word as well."

Blake frowned. "Surely he doesn't talk like that to you?"

"Only because the subject doesn't ever come up."

"But it's been two years, Del! You must have talked about it!"

Tarrant felt that he was being judged and he didn't like it. Blake could be so unrealistic sometimes.

"What would be the point, Roj? The whole thing only exists as long as your continued tolerance. I can't commit so much as the next five minutes to him and he's be a fool to confess anything that can't be reciprocated."

"But that's what I'm trying to put right!" Blake protested. "And neither of you will co-operate at all!"

Tarrant sighed. “Do you remember the first time I asked you to marry me?”

“It’s not the sort of thing I’d forget.”

“You said no, and you forbade me to ask again for six months. You wanted to be sure we were marrying for the right reasons, and over twenty years have proved you right.”

He found his voice rising. “You asked Avon to marry us to facilitate his sex life. You didn't even ask me first whether I wanted someone else as part of the most important thing of my life. You didn't talk about what marriage might mean or whether any of this was really love, or how it would change things between all of us. You proposed marriage as a trivial piece of bureaucracy to socially legitimise a relationship you weren't involved in and knew next to nothing about. How do you think either of us feels about that?”

Blake was staring at him. "I didn't mean it like that!"

"You're the diplomat. How much are good intentions worth?”

Blake shook his head. “I need to think about what you’ve said. Can we talk about the political situation?”

Tarrant made an effort to let his temper subside. “Go ahead.”

“We- IndSys, that is- are putting out a statement based on what we’ve been hearing from Earth. I’ll forward a copy, but basically it reaffirms our commitment to the peace deal and warns them that we’re not going to roll over and play dead if it’s broken. All systems in Earth Sector have mobilised and everywhere else is on military alert. There’s no chance of them catching us unprepared.”

“I know Earth’s military better than anyone,” Tarrant said. 

“Not until they break the peace,” Blake said. “Until then we stick to the letter of the deal. I’m sorry, Del, but the most useful thing you can do now is recover Cally.”

“Taking Liberator inside the Solar System without permission breaks the accords as well.”

“I know. But I can trust you three and Orac to do it without getting caught. And if they somehow do spot Liberator she’s not officially an IndSys ship and she’s recovering her crew. We can bluff that one if we must.”

Blake glanced across at another screen. “Sorry, I have to go. When’s Avon likely to be awake, do you think?" 

“Another four or five hours, I would think."

“Right. I’ll probably call him then. I think he and I would both be more comfortable if it remained a private conversation.”

“I didn’t really intend to listen to the last one,” Tarrant said. “I certainly won’t eavesdrop again.”

 

Tarrant was the last of Liberator's crew to catch up properly with his missed sleep. When he finally emerged from his rooms it was to find the other two on the flight deck watching the last couple of minutes of a broadcast from one of Earth's major TV news companies.

Tarrant picked a comfy chair to eat his plate of breakfast, since he wasn't officially on shift. "What have I missed?"

"Earth claims it has no intention of breaking the peace unilaterally but has come up with a list of supposed breaches by IndSys. Your name came up," Avon said, "a long way down the list."

"Hell with that," Tarrant said. "I've kept to their stupid accords to the letter."

"But can you prove it? Who's to say that you're not whispering military strategies into your husband's ear at night?"

"Blake doesn't ever give out advice on military strategy, for that among other reasons."

"What are the others?" Dayna asked. 

"Mostly that he's not very good at it." Tarrant said. "Accusing me won't hold water. Are any of the other claims any more substantial?"

"Not obviously," Dayna said. "It's all a bit of a damp squib really. It doesn't feel to me like they are trying to build up to war."

"Well, that's good," Tarrant said. "Have we heard from Cally?"

"Not a word." Avon said. "If Earth's not up to something, what would stop her calling?"

 

The day dragged slowly by. Blake called, was told about Cally and disappeared, frowning. If he'd spoken to Avon earlier them neither of them let on. 

Frais put out a statement denying knowledge of any breaches and proposing a joint commission to investigate. Several hours later Earth replied, quibbling about the terms of the commission. That seemed generally encouraging, but there was still nothing from Cally and Orac confirmed that military manoeuvres continued. 

Dayna went for a sleep; she'd officially been off shift for hours. Tarrant didn't raise any personal matters with Avon white they were alone on the flight deck. This felt too much like the middle of an uncertain operation. 

His console was showing another 38 hours of this. Sod that. Cally had already been out of touch for that long.

"Zen. Increase speed to standard by 12."

Avon glanced at him but said nothing.

"Revised arrival time?"

"Seven hours and seven minutes."

"That's better. Monitor long range scan, will you, Avon?"

"Last time you did this it didn't work out well." Avon moved to the scan console.

"That was standard by thirteen. Significantly more dangerous. Twelve is safe enough with full scans, fast reflexes and a very small helping of luck."

“Let’s hope that we’re lucky then,” Avon said dryly.

 

"Blip, far left. " Avon spoke for the first time in a couple of hours.

Tarrant could see it on his subscreen now. Not yet anywhere near their path. "Keep tracking it." 

"There's a second. Three... Lots more. More than I can track."

"Zen, rapid deceleration to standard by eleven. Stand by for further deceleration." He could feel the wrench as the ship slowed down. 

"Still closing fast." Avon warned.

Three, two, one..."Ten"

There was a mass of dots in the top half of the screen. The ship was still headed towards them faster than almost anything else in the galaxy could manage.

Two, one..."Nine."

"Tarrant!" Avon warned sharply but he'd rather take his chances on a highly unlikely collision than have the ship shake itself apart from decelerating too fast. 

"Eight." They were coming down the screen more gradually now as the ship slowed. There must be at least thirty of them. Slowing to meet them was safest to avoid collisions but not optimal if they turned out armed and hostile. 

"Seven. Avon, find out what the hell they are!"

"On it," Avon said. 

Dayna came running into the room. "Why are we decelerating?"

"Unknown objects all over scan." Avon said. "Get weapons and shields up."

"Are we camouflaged?" She slid behind her console.

"Zen, six. They'll have seen us bearing down on them at standard by twelve. We're not going to get away with pretending to be normal traffic."

"Twelve? Never mind. Powering up all shields. "

"They are small." Avon said. "Three metres, max."

"Good." Serious weaponry needed a serious power source and Tarrant didn't know of any that could fit in a three metre chassis along with an interstellar engine. It was about the size of the craft he raced and they weren't dangerous to anyone but their pilots. "Do we fly straight through or stop and take a look?"

"Their flight paths suggest that they come from Earth sector." Avon said. "We'll take a cautious look. Keep shields up and weapons hot."

"Got it." The ship had shed enough speed to manoeuvre safely. "Zen, standard deceleration to match velocity of nearest object on scan."

Avon was still focused on his console. "No life signs. They're unmanned."

The main screen showed the tiny ships scattered across a good two hundred thousand spacials. It felt wrong to Tarrant. If they'd come from the same place why wouldn't they be clustered? 

"They're on different courses," he said aloud. "Zen, identify likely destinations of all objects assuming constant acceleration and no course changes."

After a long pause a list appeared. 

"Frais is on there," Avon said. "And several other major IndSys systems in that sector. Zen, show all available scan information on the nearest object on main screen."

It was a sealed bronze cylinder, about a metre across and two and a half long with a simple quantum engine at the back. Tarrant could see no means of manoeuvring either in deep space or atmosphere. 

"Any communications equipment or signals detected?"

"No currently active communications," Zen said. 

"If it can't brake or turn it can't make planetfall." Dayna was squinting at the screen. "What's the point?"

"Maybe that is the point," Avon said. "Options?"

"Destroy them," Dayna suggested. "If Earth sent them they're not going to be friendly."

"I think we should pick one up and take it apart," Tarrant countered. "If it's a novel attack they could do it again. The Systems need to be warned."

"We're not bringing it inside the ship." Avon said. "It could be carrying contaminants." 

Tarrant glanced at Dayna. "Fair point. I'll get a decontamination suit. Bring us up to fifty thousand spacials and get a shuttle ready."

When he got to the shuttle, suited up and with his helmet in his hand, Avon was waiting. 

"I've put close range scan equipment in there. Orac can advise on operating it. Don't risk physical contact until we've had a chance to process the scan data."

Tarrant glanced inside the small shuttle. To his surprise the computer was on the dashboard. "Are you sure you want to risk Orac?"

"If you come back without it I might not let you dock. This is not a good time for your usual brand of rash heroics. Just take a look and report back."

Tarrant glanced back at Avon and for a moment he saw only the lines on his face, deeper than usual.

"I'll come back," he said, just as he would have said to Blake, and a similar impulse had him duck back out from the shuttle entrance to brush a kiss on Avon's cheek. He broke away and was inside the shuttle before the man could react. "No heroics, I promise," he called back as the door closed.


	3. Chapter 3

Nothing came back across the radio.

Tarrant wasn't surprised. Given the scan image that he’d transmitted across to the ship, he too could think of absolutely nothing to say.

“Your unnecessary curiosity has been satisfied.” Orac’s voice cut through the silence. “These objects are clearly no threat to Liberator. You should return me to the ship immediately.”

“Shut up,” Tarrant snarled. The shuttle was keeping pace with the cylinder a bare fifty metres away and accelerating slowly through empty space. Nothing about its smooth bronze exterior could possibly suggest its contents.

“What if it’s not from Earth?“ Dayna said eventually, Her voice wasn't entirely steady. "Maybe it’s some planet faced with catastrophe, trying to save something.”

“Not with that engine.” 

Tarrant remembered the enthusiasm with which he’d sold the idea to Blake; a simple, accurate, reliable, constant acceleration engine that could take a package between star systems without the need for any guidance systems. Quantum engines had been in use for a century but no military had fully developed the idea. The potential civilian uses were endless.

Despite cosmetic differences from the prototype, this was undoubtedly the final outcome of the military research project he’d signed off on. Thirty engines and their payloads had come from Earth.

“Orac.” Dayna’s voice came more definite now. “How many of these pods would you expect to be destroyed en route?”

Without a guidance system any object powered only by a quantum engine was utterly vulnerable to collisions in space. That had been why the idea had been so underdeveloped; they were useless for manned ships. Nobody would volunteer to cross space in a ship that might not reach its destination. 

These ships weren’t manned. Not precisely. Not voluntarily; that much was certain.

“Assuming an average journey time of twenty days, three percent during deep space flight,” Orac said sulkily. "A further nine percent will be destroyed once they come within five AUs of a star.”

“So we have to rescue them.” Dayna’s tone didn’t allow for contradiction.

“Quantum engines can’t be turned off,” Tarrant said. “We’ll have to destroy or detach them before we can take the capsules on board. It could take a couple of hours for each one.”

“Three days.” Avon's voice was unnaturally calm, even for him. “Have you forgotten about Cally?”

“What choice do we have?” Tarrant demanded. The scan showed the inside of the pod filled with machinery surrounding a very small cavity containing a tiny, curled up, instantly recognisable shape. “They’re babies!”

“Technically they are still foetuses.” Avon said. "That’s an artificial placenta connected by an umbilical cord. They haven’t been born, yet.”

“Do you really think that makes any difference?” Dayna sounded stressed now.

“What I think is that we should consider what they might be doing here before we leap in to take the bait. They are in suspended animation and three percent over twenty days is a tiny risk per hour; we can afford to think before we act.”  
   
"Not bait set for us." Tarrant looked away from the screen. That image wasn't helping him concentrate. "They don't even have beacons. It was a million to one chance that we'd run into them. They weren't meant to be stumbled on by accident."

"They wouldn't be spotted by most system defenses either, even if they were actively looking for them," Dayna added. "Not given their size and at the speed they will be going. They'll either go straight through the system and out the other side or get pulled into a gravity well."

"So what's the point? If they won't be found, why send them to the system at all?"

There was a pause, and he imagined them exchanging looks. He wished he were back in the ship with them and not out here in the cold with this terrible thing.

"Hostages." Avon's voice was grim. "Earth's got the flight data to pinpoint their position. If it refuses to give it to the system, the infant dies on their doorstep."

"That makes no sense," Tarrant said. "The IndSys leaders are decent enough people but they aren't stupidly sentimental. They'll no doubt do whatever they reasonably can to rescue a baby abandoned in space but they're not going to surrender because Earth threatens to slaughter a few of its own children, even if it's happening in their systems. It will just strengthen public feeling against the Republic." 

"We're missing something," Avon said.

"What does it matter what they intended?" Dayna said. "The children will be safe with us. I'm sure it won't be that hard to find loving homes for twenty nine babies."

"Twenty nine?" Tarrant asked.

"Just look at her in there!" Dayna said. "Look what they've done to her! Wherever she came from she needs a new family now."

Tarrant wasn't sure how Dayna could be so sure of the sex but she was the one doing the whole pregnancy thing so he was willing to take her word for it. Still, there was certainly very little else that one could tell from the tiny outline. They couldn't be sure that it was even still alive. He rather wished that she hadn't set her mind on keeping the poor mite before they had found out more about it, but that was Dayna. There would be no point in arguing.

"Avon, you're going to have to figure out a quick way to disengage the quantum engines," he said. "Cally can't afford for us to take three days over this."

He couldn't quite hear the sigh but he could imagine it well enough. 

"You'd best bring my computer back then."

In the end it took just sixteen hours before all thirty bronze capsules were lined up in one of the unpressurised holds, each carefully labelled with its precise flight path information in case identifying them individually ever became relevant. Dayna had clearly been tempted to thaw out her new daughter on the spot but she had to concede that Cally needed them and the baby would come to no harm in suspended animation until she could be born safely. 

There could be no question of any more six hour shifts until they'd all rested. Liberator set off again at a sedate-ish standard by ten on automatics and Tarrant crashed out on the double bed in his quarters, hoping devoutly for no more emergencies for at least seven hours. 

 

Tarrant didn't know what had woken him until the knock came again.

"Hang on a moment, Dayna!"

He was halfway to his wardrobe when the door slid open. Turning, he grabbed the bedcover up to his naked waist but it was Avon not Dayna, who walked over to the double bed, grasped the patterned green material and tugged it out of Tarrant's hands. He smoothed it back down on the bed and sat on it, for all the world as if he were a regular visitor. 

To Tarrant's best knowledge, Avon had only once entered the room he shared with Blake in all the years that he'd been on Liberator. "Something's wrong?"

"Something is going to be wrong," Avon corrected him. "As soon as Dayna stops being obsessed with these capsules long enough to stop and think." There was a slight emphasis on 'these'.

"Ah." Tarrant had rather been hoping that he was the only one to have thought about how IndSys spread in a wide arc around the remains of the Republic, and that quantum engines and suspension tanks were cheap, and that neither military nor scientists ever did a new thing just once when they could duplicate it. 

"They are tiny!" he protested. "Liberator could search space for a thousand years and not find one, even if we knew roughly where to look. Dayna will have to accept that. There's no way to find any more of them."

"There is one way," Avon said."If we find someone who can give us their original flight path data."

"And how do we do that? Earth has three thousand military installations. There are about five hundred in the rest of the solar system. It's not like one of those little planets we used to raid with everything under one dome. It's Earth."

"And you're its ex-Commander. You have contacts, accesses. You've seen the top secret projects and we've got Orac. Couldn't you trace where these came from?"

"My information is five years old and the moment I contact the wrong person on Earth Liberator's cover is blown and we're running for our lives ahead of half Earth's fleet. This is just not possible, Avon! You have to see that! Why would you even be thinking about trying this?"

"Of course we're not going to try it," Avon said. "I'm not throwing away my ship on a hopeless cause. What I need you to do is convince Dayna that I've made the only possible decision. I didn't want you bounced into trying something reckless by her desperation, and you know she will be desperate."

"i know," Tarrant said. "And I don't see why I should be the one arguing with her. Why don't you just tell her you won't do it and have done with it? It's your ship."

"Because this time she won't forgive me," Avon said."Not if she thinks there was a chance and I wouldn't take it. And if I tell her it's impossible she'll assume I'm lying. You might convince her. She thinks you care." The last with some disdain.

"So you're using me." Tarrant said. He couldn't think of any way out of it, though. Going after other capsules if they even existed really was impossible. "I'll tell her what I've told you, but if she doesn't believe me there's nothing else I can do. Can I get dressed now?"

"You could," Avon said. "Or I could get undressed." 

"Here?" He couldn't avoid letting his startlement show."

"Squeamish?"

Rather, yes. This was his and Blake's room, albeit on Avon's ship. Tarrant was being pushed into making some sort of decision or maybe declaration, and he wasn't sure what it was.

Blake would tell him not to be ridiculous. What did it matter which bed they used? After all Avon had already tried to murder Servalan post-coitally in this one and Blake hadn't turned a hair. 

"Shouldn't we be on the flight deck?"

"Zen can do without us for fifteen minutes."

"I thought you didn't care to be rushed?"

"Needs must." 

He walked to stand naked in front of the man sitting on the coverlet, running his fingers through the short greying hair as he looked down. "I'm pretty sure I haven't just become insanely irresistible, so what's this really about?"

Avon placed his hands on Tarrant's hips. "Just a small experiment."

"And if I say no?"

"Then we'll both go unsatisfied but I'll have some relevant data."

Avon's palms were warm, shifting down his thighs. Tarrant resisted the impulse to kiss him.

"Is this really the best time to be carrying out your experiments?"

"The timing's not entirely of my choosing."

That made more sense. "So what did Blake say?"

"Plenty, as usual. An admission that he was wrong, which is considerably less usual. In case he hasn't told you, the marriage proposal has been formally withdrawn."

"Oh," Tarrant said, surprised and slightly taken aback. It hadn't been a good idea but it had at least been an idea and it was unlike Blake to just give up on one of those. 

"You're disappointed." Avon observed.

"Of course not. It wasn't as if you'd ever have said yes."

Avon looked up at him, eyebrows raised. "And that disappoints you? That's a little unexpected."

"I just want a solution," Tarrant said. "I don't really care what it is."

He leaned down to start unlacing Avon's shirt. "Since you're determined to stamp all over my carefully drawn borders you might as well get both your data and your satisfaction."

For all Avon's objection to being rushed, he and Tarrant often didn't take long over it; not always, by any means, but more than occasionally. Tarrant was aware of his own tendency to encourage Avon in the direction of the sort of things that he and Blake wouldn't do and hard fast sex was definitely one of those. He had never really wondered what Avon might have been like in bed if their situation had been different. Things were what they were. 

So they managed to be on the flight deck in barely more than fifteen minutes without any further conversation. Tarrant took a look at the route ahead and increased their speed to standard by eleven. He suggested hopefully that Avon might sort out coffee and breakfast and was pleased to find both making an appearance shortly afterwards. 

"Thanks." The coffee was hot and strong. He kept the mug in his hand while he tracked a large interstellar rock passing close to their course. He was starting to feel quite upbeat again which probably had more to do with his recent orgasm than their objective situation. They still had to retrieve Cally, but they had Liberator to do it with. 

Avon took the empty mug out of his hand, put it down on a console then to Tarrant's surprise and discomfort wrapped his arms around him. 

Tarrant pulled away from the kiss. "Not here!"

"Why not?"

"Because Dayna could come in!"

"Have you any idea how often Blake kisses you in public?" Avon still had his hands on Tarrant's shoulders.

"That's different," Tarrant said. "That's affection. When you kiss me it's foreplay."

"An interesting distinction. Well, we had certainly better not expose Dayna to any of that." Avon let him go and walked back to his own console. "Zen, open a channel to Roj Blake."

Blake was as baffled as the rest of them as to the purpose of the capsules, but agreed that without any further information there was nothing more for Liberator to do. Assuming that any other capsules had been sent at the same time they had a couple of weeks before the existence of the bizarre packages from Earth need become public knowledge. 

"Maybe Cally can help. How long until you reach Earth?"

"Six hours. Any more news about what they are up to?"

"They claim to still be considering the proposed commission. Nothing outright belligerent is coming out of official channels but a lot of our usual Earth sources seem to have gone silent, not just Cally. Let me speak to her as soon as you have her on board."

"Will do."

"Anything else?"

Tarrant glanced across at Avon. "Not that I can think of. You?"

"Results in so far strongly indicate that I'm right, which should hardly come as a surprise."

"No comment." Blake said. "I'd better get back to work. Take care in Earth System, love, and I'll speak to you soon." The connection broke.

"Going to tell me what that was about?"

"No," Avon said. "Here's Dayna."

She appeared at the door, out of breath. "What if there's more of them?"

Tarrant avoided glancing over at Avon. "We've been talking about that with Blake. Sit down and I'll fill you in on where we've got to."

 

They entered the Solar System under the alias of a corporate survey ship, an excuse for a high orbit that would cover the whole of the Earth within the next twelve hours. Dayna could be relied upon to convince Earth Control of their bona fides in her usual professional fashion, however unhappy she was.

Tarrant and Avon ran a variety of scans for a trace of Cally's signal. Liberator's people had long since abandoned bracelets in favour of bone implants which were detectable only by the most meticulous of body scans. No one had lost one yet but they were a little harder to make contact with than the bracelets had been. 

"Got it," Avon said after a couple of hours. "Zen, map the signal onscreen."

The aerial view showed a large group of buildings in scrubland. Zen had labelled it Military Intelligence Group. 

"Ah. Your old friends, Commander," Avon said. 

Tarrant gritted his teeth and said nothing. He'd failed to keep his intelligence group in check and as far as he could tell his successors hadn't even tried. 

"Give us a detailed scan of the area, Zen. Humans and weapons." Avon stood back to consider the full screen. 

Around two score people were scattered about the facility. Some were obviously guards at entrances but about half were in the main building, with Cally's signal coming from the centre. She was in a room with six other people, all unarmed. 

"Other prisoners or interrogators." Tarrant glanced across at Avon. "Know any way of telling which?"

"Not from up here."

If they teleported her up in front of her captors then the MIG would know Liberator must be in orbit. With luck they could probably get out of the system before the planetary defense grid identified the ship and fired, but their long kept secret would be out and their illegal incursion would give the Republic a genuine grievance as their pretext for war. 

"We need a distraction," Tarrant said.

 

Half an hour later Tarrant was in a small copse a couple of hundred metres from the compound with a distraction in the form of a rocket launcher of the sort that Earth based terrorists might conceivably get hold of. The MIG might wonder how it had been brought this close to their guarded walls but they were highly unlikely to jump to the conclusion that it have been teleported, since the only ship in the Galaxy with teleport capacity would hopefully not have been reported anywhere within light years of the planet.

He set the launcher up and rechecked the co-ordinates with Dayna. The hit had to be close enough to where Cally was being held to make her escape in the confusion plausible but not close enough to risk hurting her and people were moving around in there unpredictably. 

"Right,"he said finally. "All set. Is Avon ready?"

"And impatient," Dayna said. 

"OK." He tied a damp cloth around the lower half of his face and checked yet again the gun in its holster. "Firing in three, two, one."

The Iauncher lit up in flame as the rocket screamed out and a couple of seconds later there was an earsplitting explosion and the ground shook. 

"Teleport!" Tarrant called out and was on the ship's teleport platform next to Avon, similarly masked 

"Put us down, Dayna." Avon said. 

Tarrant was glad of the wet cloth over his nose and mouth. Dust from the explosion was chokingly thick in the hot air. Someone came into view down the corridor; he had barely registered the uniform before Avon fired. 

Avon had taken out two more soldiers by the time the reached the door of the room Cally had been detected in. Tarrant used his gun bloodlessly on the lock. The air was clear in here; there was Cally strapped into some sort of restraining device, a humming white globe around her head, eyes shut. Everyone else looked official, which made the next choice of action simple, if unpleasant. They had agreed beforehand that they couldn't afford to leave MIG witnesses. 

"Hold the door," Avon said when the firing stopped. "I'll get her out of whatever this is."

Tarrant went back out into the smoke and dust. He heard voices and fired in their general direction- there was a scream but no one came in sight. This was the sort of operation he used to hate, where he could never be sure that it was the bad guys he was shooting at. He cared less now as long as he got Cally out and Avon safely back.

"All clear?"Avon called out after a few minutes.

"Yes"

He felt the tug of the teleport and was back on the ship. Next to him Avon was bent over with the weight of the unconscious woman. 

" Med unit" he grunted as Tarrant half lifted her from him. "And hurry."

 

"You said that you could stay in orbit for three days!"

"If we needed to." Avon said."We don't. We're pulling out as soon as we get clearance from Earth Control, which Dayna is going to request as soon as this call is finished."

"Three days would allow us to get Cally's report when she comes out of the med unit. Liberator's in no danger. There's no reason why you can't stay there for now." 

Tarrant suspected that Blake had not yet lost his temper because he hadn't grasped that Avon was serious. 

"I have no reason to stay." Avon sounded dismissive. "We successfully got Cally out, assuming that whatever they did to her can be fixed. I've no intention of risking my ship to act as your spy in the Solar System. "

"What risk? You have camouflage!"

"And that's information that they might have got out of Cally. I'm not going to sit up here being complacent about the effectiveness of our disguise right up to the moment that the defense grid opens fire."

"Del. Tell me what you think the risk is."

Tarrant tried not to look as dismayed as he felt. "Very low, I would think. We destroyed the computers as well as the interrogators." He raised a hand to Blake's interruption. "But it's Avon's call, not mine."

"This is important!" Blake snapped at him.

"Isn't it always?" Avon said. "To you, at least. Liberator isn't at your beck and call, Blake. She's my ship. We'll head back to Frais, and I'll let you know when Cally wakes up."

"Del!" Blake protested. "You have to tell Avon..."

"I don't have to tell him anything!" Tarrant spoke over his husband. "It's his call, Blake! I'm just the pilot."

"You're not just anything!" Blake insisted, "And I'm counting on you to keep that ship right where she is!"

Yes, this was turning out to be every bit as bad as Tarrant had anticipated. There wasn't much point in appealing to Avon, who loathed being pushed around, or to Blake who was clearly in pursuit of the Greater Good. 

"Sort it out between yourselves," he said. "I'll be in the rec room if anyone needs me to fly something." And he walked out on both of them.


	4. Chapter 4

There wasn't enough room to overtake in the narrow canyon but Tarrant tried it anyway.

For a moment he thought he'd succeeded but as his left wingtip jerked slightly from the other flyer's turbulence his right grazed an outcrop on the canyon wall and the fragile metal buckled around him.

He hit the exit button and the spiralling images of the river below disappeared, to be replaced by the brightness of the rec room. Leaning back in his chair he took a deep breath and waited for his heart rate to settle.

"When was the last time you landed that in one piece?" Avon was at the door, watching. 

"If it isn't difficult it's no fun. Are we off, then?"

Avon's smile was so slight that he nearly missed it. "Have you so little faith in your husband's powers of persuasion?"

"We're not staying?"

"We've picked up some very short range military comms, which aren't Orac-proofed. No one's talking about Liberator. The assumption is that the raid was the work of Cally's Siberian gang. Given that, the risk of staying in orbit a little longer is minimal."

"And what are we going to do here?"

"Spy for Blake," Avon said. "Cally should be awake in the next few hours. Earth's up to something strange and we might as well try to figure it out "

"Wonders will never cease. What would you like me to do?"

 

"The partial message was picked up from military intelligence a year ago."

Cally was leaning forward, nearly out of the seat they'd insisted she stay in. After food and a bath she wasn't looking as weak as when she'd come out if the med unit but Tarrant thought she could do with rest. 

"No one understood it though, and they didn't think to let me see it. People on Earth know nothing about Auron. I saw it by chance just a couple of weeks ago."

"There was a message about your planet?" On the screen Blake was frowning.

"About cloning," she said.

"Like Blake's clone?" Avon asked 

"That was an abomination, force-grown and brainwashed. The ones referred to seemed to be just ordinary clones, which is what was so puzzling."

"Cloning is illegal in all post-Federation systems," Blake said.

"But that's just cultural superstition." Cally insisted. "Cloning is safe and ethical. It produces perfectly healthy children and the technology's not difficult. I couldn't see why the Earth military would be interested in it. Anyway things were starting to heat up politically and we all had more pressing concerns. But when Dayna told me about the babies I thought it might be connected."

"It might," Blake admitted, "but I don't see why. If the babies are clones what difference would it make?"

"I can think of two things," Avon said. "First, as you say, cloning is illegal. Clones might be argued to have no legal protection. The military could do what they like with them."

Both Blake and Cally protested that Republic law wouldn't work that way. Avon shrugged. "It could be arguable. That's often all the military need for authorisation. The other thing is that they must each be a clone of an existing person. The identity of that parent might be relevant."

"Can we get DNA samples from the babies?" Tarrant asked.

"Not while they are in suspended animation. It's a closed system; any disturbance could be fatal. "

"What about tracing the message back to its original source?"

"I can try, "Cally said doubtfully. "I'll need Orac."

 

  
"I didn't expect you to walk out."

Blake's image was now on the screen in the bedroom. It had seemed like a long time since they'd had a private conversation, or at least as private as Liberator allowed.

"I didn't either. I seemed to lack better choices at the time."

"I'm sorry," Blake said. "I shouldn't have cornered you like that."

"Anyway, you persuaded Avon on your own." Tarrant said. "That had to be better."

Blake looked a little awkward and said nothing. Illumination suddenly dawned.

"Hell. You didn't persuade him, you bought him off! What was the price?"

"Reasonable in the circumstances." Blake managed a wry smile. 

"Don't you think you should tell me what currency, at least?"

The smile vanished. "I said that I wouldn't."

"It involved me then?"

"I didn't say that."

"Come on, Roj. I'm not an idiot. I was going to tell you how oddly he's been behaving but I'm guessing now that you probably know more about that than I do."

"I doubt it," Blake said. "Whatever you may suspect us of conspiring about, he hasn't started confiding any of his intentions to me. Tell me if you want to."

"All right. He's been pushing me for things he's always steered well clear of in the past," Tarrant said, 

"What sort of things?"

Tarrant did his best not to look awkward. "Stuff previously restricted to his bedroom. Suddenly he wants to be amorous all over the ship."

"I always assumed you were anyway," Blake said.

"No we weren't," Tarrant said a little sharply. "I've never flaunted my adultery, in public, not intentionally, anyway."

"So he's grown tired of being treated like your illicit bit on the side."

"And what am I supposed to do about that?" Discomfort sharpened his voice further. "It's what he is."

"You could perhaps be a little more generous to him occasionally," Blake suggested. 

"Generous? With all due respect, Roj, you don't know what he's like in bed. He gets everything he wants."

"It doesn't sound like that's the bit he thinks he's missing out on." Blake said. 

"And what does everyone expect me to do about that? I'm married to you!"

"Everyone?" Blake asked 

"Dayna says that he sulks when I'm not around."

"There you go then," Blake said. "Have you ever asked him what he wants from you?"

"He doesn't want to be married, that's clear."

"He doesn't want to be married to me. He did point out last time we spoke that other options were available which didn't involve me poking my entirely unwanted nose into the matter at all. No doubt that's what he'd consider what I'm doing now but really, Del, you don't seem that good at getting on with it on your own."

"You're assuming that you know what I want."

"Not really," Blake said. "It's more that I'm assuming you don't know what you want, and as soon as you and Avon figure that out I'm happy to go with it. "

"And what if it turns out that what Avon really wants is a lover unencumbered by a husband? Are you still going to be complacent then?"

"Ah," Blake said. Tarrant couldn't entirely read his expression. "That's what you're frightened of."

"I'm not frightened," Tarrant snapped. "I just don't want to lose my ship and my friends and yes, my lover as well because I've pushed him into saying what should have been left unsaid."

"You don't really think that's what he wants?"

"Come on, Blake. You've known him for most of your life. What particular aspects of Avon's personality would lead you to believe that he'd be happy sharing anything important to him with anyone, let alone you?"

"But he does," Blake insisted.

"Because he has to. Because there aren't people going "What would you like instead, Avon? Tell us what you really want.""

"No." Blake shook his head. "I don't for a moment believe he'd actually try to take you away from me."

"He wouldn't have to try," Tarrant said, despairing. "He'd just have to answer the fucking question that you're so insistent that I ask him, and that's an end to the whole thing - him, the ship, everything. Unless you seriously think I'm going to keep on sleeping with someone openly cheering for our divorce?"

"If that's really what he thinks, don't you think you ought to find out for sure?"

"I don't know that's what he thinks. Maybe he's only in it for the sex and pleased enough to be rid of me to you half the time. But don't you think that if what he wanted was something easily given I'd have known about it by now?" 

A knock came at the door. "Hang on," he said to Blake, and "Come in!"

The door slid open. Avon walked straight over to Tarrant and kissed him.

A polite cough came from the screen. Avon spun round as if it had been a gunshot. For a moment he stared at Blake.

"My apologies," he said. "I thought he was alone." He turned to leave again. 

"Avon. Wait." Blake said, and Avon paused with his hand against the door.

"Your business with Tarrant looks a great deal more urgent than mine. I'll look into anything we have on cloning and get back to you. Good night, Del, Avon."

The screen went blank.

Tarrant was on his feet now. "Did you do that deliberately?"

"No." The shocked look not yet quite faded on the other man's face would have been enough to answer that question.

Tarrant was livid with anger and embarrassment. "So why the hell did you do it? Why are you doing any of this? What the fuck is wrong with you at the moment?"

"I wanted you." Avon said coldly. "I understood the feeling to be mutual."

"Fucking hell, Avon, of course it's mutual. But what the hell happened to discretion?"

"Discretion like yours?" Avon asked. "Thanks to you the entire galaxy knows we're fucking. I don't see why I should have to tiptoe around the matter on my own ship."

"That certainly wasn't tiptoeing round," Tarrant snarled. "Are you planning to send him a pornographic video next time?"

"Do you think he'd like one? I'm prepared to co-operate with your husband's kinks to a reasonable extent."

"Fuck you! Get out!'

Avon paused as the door opened. "I regret embarrassing Blake. It wasn't my intention."

"What about me?" Tarrant demanded. "Don't I get an apology?"

"You reap what you sow," Avon told him, and walked away. 

 

  
"The detention centres are full and heavily guarded," Avon said. "There's no real prospect of finding out who is held where."

"What about the cloning?" Tarrant asked.

"More luck there," Cally said. "We can't narrow it down to any particular lab but we think the woman they all report to is called Sub Commander Lente Austlan."

"That name rings a faint bell," Tarrant said. "Image?"

A woman in her late thirties looked, unsmiling, down from the screen. Her black hair was braided into unfashionable severity across her dark scalp. He remembered her now.

"She was one of Blake's aides for a short while," he said. "Diplomatic service, not military, and very junior. Sub Commander? That's some serious promotions."

Dayna was intent on the image. "She's the one responsible for putting the babies in those capsules?"

"The cloning programme reports to her." Avon said. "That's all we know so far. That and the fact that she's on her way to the Capital military spaceport. There's a space jet fuelled up for Saturn and back waiting for her."

"We're taking her out?" Dayna asked, eyes glinting.

"Not with Liberator. I've got the racer loaded up with the new EM bombs. They should stop the flyer dead if we can get close enough."

"I'll fly her for you," Dayna said.

"She's not well shielded," Avon's voice was little less acrid than usual. "I can't promise we won't get somewhat irradiated in the process. Since neither Tarrant not I are contemplating imminent parenthood it doesn't matter too much to us."

The fire in Dayna's eyes faded as she nodded reluctantly. "Liberator's shields won't let any of it through. If you need her as back up shout and I'll be there."

"We will do. Tarrant?"

Tarrant's enthusiasm for wandering around the Solar System with Avon was not huge right now, but Cally was nowhere near recovered from her ordeal and he couldn't reasonably let the man go on his own. 

"Give me Austlan's projected flight plan," he told Orac. "And find me a suitable intercept spot." 

 

The racer carried two, if they didn't mind close physical contact. Right now it carried them both even though Tarrant did.

"How are we going to get her back to the ship if we need to?" he asked, politely enough. 

"Tie her up and put her in the hold," Avon said. "I've pressurised it for this trip. She ought to survive a few hours with no worse than frostbite and a bit of radiation sickness."

Tarrant was trying to remember if Blake had ever spoken about Austlan specifically. She'd been around about twelve years ago, Tarrant thought, in the second half of Blake's presidential term. Blake had generally been kind about the inexperience of his junior aides and if he'd exploded in irritation a few times he would apologise afterwards, but they mostly came and went without much comment. 

An unknown quantity, then. There had been a time when the rank of military Sub Commander suggested a certain level of integrity and competence, but the Republic wasn't what it was when they had been in charge. It hadn't deteriorated to Federation levels, yet, but some Republic project had put infants in capsules and fired them off into all the dangers of deep space and as far as Tarrant was concerned that matched anything the Feds had dreamed up for sheer inhumanity. 

The disguised Liberator had dutifully informed Earth Central of its intent to leave Earth orbit and leave the Solar System. As it came close to Saturn's outer rings the racer had slipped free and inserted itself into a gap in the rings, relying on its small size and Avon's various modifications to go unnoticed by anyone. Now there was nothing to do but wait. 

Avon had brought a reader. Tarrant considered the glory of the huge ringed planet filling most of the screen and his long ago screw-up that would forever be associated with the place. He inevitably thought about more recent errors too. Maybe Blake was right - there wasn't any way to keep pretending this was still working. If they got it all out in the open, just perhaps they could leave it behind them and he could stay out of Avon's bed but still on the ship. 

"What are you reading?" he asked, for want of anything better to say.

Avon tipped the reader towards him. "Faithful Hound " was bold in bright green against a brown patterned background.

‘Faithful Hound' was as far as Tarrant knew the only biography ever published specifically about him. It had come out shortly after he left jail and was full of lurid inaccuracies. He was outraged. "Do you really think that's funny?"

"Necessary research. This is the brand new edition and I seem to feature in it a great deal more than I used to. It's currently number 17 in the biography bestsellers list on Earth. You're more interesting than I thought."

"Fuck." Tarrant said, tipping his head back against the seat and closing his eyes. In all the ship goings on he'd managed to forget the public relations problem. 

He'd loathed the book, the title, the way it treated him as an exotic adjunct to Blake and the journalist who'd written it. He didn't expect her treatment of more recent events to be any more even-handed.

"Show me that cover again."

He'd been right. After the title, in darker green and almost hidden in the pattern of the background, the bastards had added a bloody question mark.

For the next hour or so Avon read his book and Tarrant thought about hunting down a great number of people involved in the publishing business and letting them know precisely what he thought of their work. Finally, Avon put the reader down. 

"Well?" Tarrant wasn't all that sure that he wanted to know, 

"With luck it probably won't sell in large numbers on Frais."

"That bad?"

"Oh yes." Avon said. "The author has quite a vivid imagination. If you or I were still Republican citizens we could undoubtedly sue."

"Will it damage Blake?"

"It's probably just as well that he wanted to retire anyway." Avon said. "Isn't it time that we went hunting?"

 

“She’s going to Dione.”

Tarrant put the previously expected route on the little screen, and the updated information from Liberator’s scans on top of it. The only fuel efficient way for a small ship to land on any of Saturn’s moons was to fly past the gas giant itself, using its gravity to shed velocity. The spacejet looked as if it was still doing that, but it was going to pass far closer to the atmosphere of the planet itself than they had anticipated.

“That’s going to make manoeuvring difficult,” Avon said

“Good job you’ve got a brilliant pilot on board.” 

Tarrant sat and calculated for a few minutes. Along with the rest of their neighbouring part of the rings, the racer was already going at a fair lick perpendicular to the planet just to stay in orbit. They’d got most of that velocity from Liberator, which seldom had to worry about such mundane things as the conservation of momentum and fuel reserves. By the time it reached closest approach the spacejet would be doing about ten times their speed; it had been accelerating steadily since leaving Earth and it was falling into Saturn’s pull.

To catch it they would have to accelerate to more than its speed, and then either overshoot it, which wasn’t promising for their chances of slowing the bombs enough for the flyer to hit them, or decelerate in front of it, which given that it had guns wasn’t promising for their chances of survival.

There was an alternative.

“Right,” he said. “We’re going to head out into space, curve round, come back the other way around Saturn, meet them head on, drop the bombs in front of them, go straight past and round the planet again. By the second time we meet them their systems should be screwed and our relative velocities should be manageable.”

“That’s your plan?” Avon said.

“Do you need me to go through it again?”

“No, I think the full horror is already seared into my brain. Are you sure we have enough fuel?”

“Provided you don’t want to go sightseeing afterwards.”

“And we’re going to fly straight into their gunsights?”

“Very fast,” Tarrant said. “We won’t be in their range for more than seven seconds and half of that they’ll spend wondering what the hell we are. If we try catching them from behind we’ll be on their scans for far longer.”

“And we’re not going to just fall into the gravity well when we decelerate?”

“Not a chance.” Unless the fuel ran out, of course. Tarrant’s mood was lifting. This was a situation he could deal with.

 

He could see the flyer with the naked eye, now, closing with him exhilaratingly fast. Avon released the bombs and he accelerated just a little more so that they fanned out behind the racer. They were closing, closing… he pulled the nose up, skimming close enough over the spacejet that he could see the shape of the pilot’s head turned to follow them. 

Then the instruments all went blank as the bombs detonated. Tarrant kept to the course clear in his head while Avon was resetting the electrics, or at least trying to. Nothing happened but the man’s quiet cursing for the best part of a minute, then the screens fizzed back into life. Below them Saturn stretched from horizon to horizon. 

“Do you think we got them?” he asked.

“I would think so.” Avon said. At the speed they were going they had already left the scene of the incident far behind. They wouldn’t be sure until they circled the planet again for the second encounter, hopefully with a damaged and helpless craft but conceivably with one on alert with weapons ready.

Tarrant checked the fuel gauge. It showed about what he had expected; just enough to burn round the huge planet at the racer’s top acceleration and fall on their prey again in less than a couple of hours. After that they’d be limping back to Liberator on fumes.

 

There it is.” Avon had been watching the scans avidly.

Exactly where the spacejet would be expected to be if it had not used its engines since their attack. That didn’t necessarily mean that it couldn’t- an efficient gravity well flypast didn’t need engines. But if Tarrant had come under unexpected attack, the last thing he’d do given a choice was to keep on a course where he could be found easily. Unless, of course, he intended a counter ambush.

The racer was decelerating hard. The plan was to fly past more slowly this time, loop around and come back in the same direction so that they could match velocities. Saturn’s gravity well had things to say about that sort of manoeuvre this close. Tarrant intended to override the planet. “Let me know as soon as you can tell if anything’s live.”

“Nothing yet,” Avon said. “Looks dead in the water.”

“Not too dead, I hope.” The jet should have emergency suits to keep the passengers alive in the case of power failures. 

Closer now. “Still no signs of life,” Avon said.

It was going to be within firing range shortly. “Stand by weapons,” Tarrant said.

Nothing. Still nothing, and they were past it, not so close this time, but it hadn’t moved or fired. 

“If they’re playing chicken with us they’ve got nerves of steel,” Avon said.

“Hold tight for some serious Gs.” Tarrant took the flyer up in a tight curve, far tighter than the racer’s anti-acceleration field could compensate for. For a few seconds it felt like all of Saturn was crushing them, then he was levelled out in the opposite direction and accelerating again to get the spacejet back in their sights.

“You ok?”

“I’m getting too old for this,” Avon muttered.

“Come on, it’s fun!”

“It would be more fun if you hadn’t crashed every simulation you played in the last month.”

“You’ve been keeping score?” Tarrant risked a glance over to him. “Don’t worry. They were close to impossible. This is just very difficult.”

There was the spacejet. He decelerated again so that they approached it with glacial slowness. Their weapons were hot but scans were telling them that it was nothing much but an inert heap of metal. 

“Three life signs detected.”

“Oh, good.” This hadn’t been a complete waste of effort, then. 

“Assume they’ve got hand weapons,” Avon said.

“I was going to. Can you find their suits’ radio frequency?

“Onto it.”

 

“Shut up and listen,” Avon said to the voices on the com. “That’s better. This is a kidnapping. It can go in one of two ways. Either we take apart your ship, carefully of course, and pick up your passenger from the wreckage, or she comes out of her own accord.”

“Either way we’ll notify Saturn Control of your position, once we’re clear.” Tarrant added. “But I reckon your chances of survival are going to be considerably higher if you still have a ship around you while you wait to be picked up.“

There was a silence.

“How do we know you won’t just kill us?” one voice asked.

“We have no quarrel with the Wingers,” Tarrant said. A bit of Airforce slang couldn’t hurt. “We’re not terrorists or pirates. We just have some questions for your passenger about her recent activities.”

He wondered if she had a suicide pill. He doubted it. Suicide was a bit out of fashion these days. Nobody had that much loyalty to anyone but themselves.

She probably wouldn’t come out voluntarily. With any luck the pilots would give her a push. Tarrant noticed that they weren’t asking about her chances of survival. If they did jettison her they’d probably be hoping that she didn’t survive to report back to their superiors. At the moment Tarrant had no idea whether Liberator would let her go or not. It rather depended on what she had to say and how difficult it was to get her to say it.

“All right.” That was a second, male voice. “She’s going to come out of the airlock.”

“I am not!” a sharp voice said. 

“Hand weapon fire,” Avon said. “It’s stopped now.”

The airlock opened and a figure in a spaceship tumbled free.

“Height and weight match.” Avon confirmed. “No weapons.”

“Well if it isn’t her, we know where to look.”

They had come ready with a net and grappels. It didn’t take long to get the figure into the hold airlock and cycle it.

Tarrant moved the racer a sensible distance away from the stricken spacejet and took a look at the internal cameras. He could see her face now, eyes flickering open. The suit’s right leg seemed to be scorched.

“What do you think? Will she be OK in there?”

Avon frowned. “It’s there or nowhere. I think we should get her back to Liberator as quickly as we can.”

 

Tarrant got as much as he could out of what was left in the fuel tank but in the end Liberator had to backtrack to pick them up, a manoeuvre that the cruiser it was disguised as certainly couldn’t have managed.

Dayna was all polite confusion when Saturn Control queried their position. Of course they were on their proposed route. How could they possibly be where Control suggested? There had been a major magnetic asteroid swarm near their position; perhaps Control needed to recalibrate its instruments? Within an hour they were registering as back exactly where they were supposed to be and an apologetic Control had confirmed that the problem must have been at its end.

“Don’t pull that trick too often,” Avon said. “It only needs someone to notice that several different instruments are all coming up with the same error and we’re screwed. How soon can we get out of here?”

“Ninety minutes till we’re signed off by Solar Control.”

“Sod it,“ Tarrant said. “If we go to FTL now they’ll just think we’re jumping the queue, stick a standard reckless navigation penalty on our record and forget about us. I want to get those pilots picked up before they die out there and I want us to be out of here before that happens.”

“Do it.” Avon confirmed to Dayna. “Orac, has the accident data been inserted into Saturn Control’s records?”

“Affirmative.”

“Then set it to flag up for them in the next ten minutes. Cally, how is our guest doing?”

“Still being kept unconscious. The med unit estimates six hours until her injuries are treated.”

 

Lente Austlan had passed out shortly after the racer picked her up. Tarrant had privately been relieved; if she had witnessed their rendezvous with the disguised ship inside Sol system then letting her go again would have been difficult. Executing a prisoner was something he really didn’t want to have to do. Avon could do it in cold blood, he knew, but he didn’t want Avon doing it either.

She was awake now, sitting in front of the mirror in the set of rooms they’d locked her in, rebraiding those parts of her complex hairstyle that had come loose. She’d taken a shower to get the med unit residue off her skin and dressed herself in the Republic military officer’s uniform that had been left out for her. If she had been self-conscious about cameras watching her Cally said that she hadn’t shown it. 

“Well,“ Tarrant said. “I suppose we’d better ask her a few questions. How uncivilised are we prepared to get?”

They had decided that there wasn’t much point in trying to hide the identity of either themselves or the ship. All traces of her camouflage had been erased; let the Republic think that the racer had met up with Liberator outside the system.

“As much as we need to be,” Avon was watching the precise movements of her fingers on the screen. “There’s potentially a great deal at stake.”

 

She turned her head as the door opened, but didn’t stand.

“Commander Tarrant. Ex-commander Tarrant. So this is the Liberator?”

“Sub Commander Austlan. Yes.”

“So I’m an IndSys prisoner of war?”

“No,” Tarrant said. “This is an independent operation. As far as I’m aware, IndSys doesn’t know that you exist.”

“Deniability.” She said. “Dishonourable. I suppose that I might have expected it from you. Is your husband behind this kidnapping, assuming that he still is your husband?”

“Are you fully recovered from your injuries?” he asked instead of replying.

“Yes,” she said. “Since you were responsible for inflicting them you’d excuse my lack of gratitude for the medical treatment you imposed. Did you kill my pilots?”

He was a little surprised that she’d asked. “They were recovered about an hour ago. As soon as we have any information about their condition, I’ll let you know. In the meantime we have some questions for you about the projects you’ve recently been overseeing.”

“That’s top secret information.”

“Of course it is. But we haven’t gone to a great deal of trouble and no little risk to pick you up so we can be fobbed off with that.”

“I’m a prisoner of war,” she said. “There are protocols for my treatment.” 

“I know every line of the Republican standing orders on dealing with prisoners of war,” Tarrant said. “I wrote most of them. You are not a POW, Sub Commander and no one on this ship is military. What we are concerned with is preventing atrocity and what we will do is what's necessary. We have a history of doing just that, if you remember.” 

He thought he'd maybe shaken her a little bit she wasn't really showing it. “I want to speak to Blake, not his dog.”

"Blake's not here. It's isn't his ship."

"Then I'll talk to your other master."

"By all means. Wait here."

“Knock yourself out,” he said to Avon as they crossed paths. “She's going to take a bit of persuading.”

 

It didn't make pleasant watching. Avon was cold, hard, almost wordless and physically brutal. He seemed less interested in getting answers than in getting screams. If he'd treated any prisoner like that while under Tarrant's command, he'd have been court martialled. This time Tarrant sat and watched him do it. 

After half an hour Avon left the room and sent in Cally. He and Tarrant sat together and watched her steady questioning about the cloning project. She was getting a few answers now but not enough, not the key ones.

"Another round?" Tarrant asked. 

"I suppose we must." Avon's response was slow and reluctant. 

“We could switch around,” Tarrant suggested.

“No, we couldn’t,” Avon said. “Stick to what you’re capable of and I’ll do the same.”

“Dayna would rip her to shreds if she thought she had anything to do with those babies.” 

Dayna had reluctantly been persuaded to stay on the flight deck and away from their prisoner. She was too closely associated with the fake cruiser in Earth records.

“We’ll get there,” Avon said. “Go in and spell Cally for a bit. I need some strong coffee at a minimum before I go in there again.” 

 

“We’re forty thousand light years from Earth, far outside Republic borders,” Tarrant told Austlan. It wasn’t anything like the right figure but he wasn’t an idiot. “Liberator can outgun and outrun any ship in the Galaxy. We can stay out here for months without needing to make any contact with anyone. There is absolutely no chance whatsoever of anyone rescuing you.” 

He smiled, very slightly and without any amusement. “We aren’t going to kill you, by accident or on purpose. There’s the med unit if Avon goes a little too far. This is important to us; we aren’t going to just give up.”

She wiped crimson from the corner of her mouth. “I suppose you think there’s no blood on your hands.”

“Of course there is,” Tarrant said. “I could stop him, but I won’t, not until we have what we need. Have you anything to tell me, or shall I send him in?

“You’re a bastard,“ she told him. “Blake was an arrogant self-satisfied prick but he wasn’t a monster. He didn’t deserve your betrayal.” 

“Don’t believe everything the pop press feeds you,” Tarrant suggested. He turned to the door. “I’m informed that your pilots will make a full recovery, by the way. We are not monsters, but right now your silence is costing lives and we will break it.”

Again he met Avon in the corridor, striding forward with a grim expression. Tarrant reached out to press a hand against his shoulder and the man stopped. 

“What is it?”

Tarrant wrapped his hands around the other man’s shoulders and kissed him. After a long moment Avon pulled away.

“This is not the time.”

“This is precisely the time,” Tarrant told him. “Whatever you have to do in there, you need to know that I…” He screeched to a mental halt, suddenly realising what he’d been about to say. Avon was silent, dark eyes watching him. Fuck this. If now wasn’t the time, when would be? “I love you,” he said. 

“Well, that’s completely screwed up my mental preparation,” Avon said. “I’ve got to go in there and beat up a terrified and potentially innocent woman and all the time I’m going to be seriously distracted wondering what the hell you think you’re talking about.”

“I didn’t think it was that ambiguous.”

“You wouldn’t. Take it from me, whenever the number of people you’re saying it to exceeds one, there are definite ambiguities involved. Your timing is terrible; just go away and let me refocus on the job in hand.”

Avon didn’t seem too distracted. Tarrant watched the camera feed, his thoughts a chaotic tumble of fondness and revulsion. He’d spent all this time trying to figure out what Avon was feeling without ever really asking himself what he felt. Of course he loved Avon; that’s why the thought of losing him had been so bitter. That’s why throughout all the arguments there had been that little burning joy in his heart, ever since Dayna had told him how much the man missed him. 

Blake had known, obviously, hence his eagerness to keep them together. Avon probably hadn’t known; there was after all Blake in the picture, who Tarrant loved openly and overwhelmingly. Avon knew now. Tarrant wondered what he’d do. 

Right then Avon was bringing his booted heel down on Austlan’s splayed hand. She screamed. Tears were running down her cheeks as she mouthed something up at him. Avon considered her for a moment, his face blank, kicked her in the ribs and walked out. 

Tarrant was on his feet, running down the corridor. He met Avon and Cally a short distance from the locked room.

“It’s done.” Avon looked white and drained. “Go and get what we need from her, Cally, before she regains her nerve. Then put her in the med unit.”

Tarrant could think of nothing to say that wouldn’t sound like criticism, so he just threw his arms around the man and held him close. He could feel Avon shaking, just a little, in his embrace.

“Come and sit down.”

“Sod that,” Avon said. “I need to fuck you. Now.” 

“Cally…”

“Dayna can watch the cameras. We won’t be long.”

Whatever he might have thought about Tarrant’s declaration, right then Avon didn’t want to talk about that or anything else. He wanted only to get them both naked and then to pin Tarrant face down and fuck him hard; not violently but as if his sanity depended on coming as soon and as deep inside him as could be achieved. 

Avon wasn’t usually an entirely selfish lover, and if he’d taken no interest in Tarrant’s pleasure it was a sign of just how disturbed he had been. Tarrant felt him convulse, lie motionless on top of him for a while, then disengage and roll away. He came up on his side to face Avon.

“Better?”

“Mmm.” Avon said. He sounded as if he were about to fall asleep.

“We ought to get up.”

“You haven’t come,” Avon pointed out, without opening his eyes. 

“You’ll have to owe me one,” Tarrant said. “I need to get up anyway. You could stay here for a while.”

“I can’t stay either.” Avon reluctantly opened his eyes. “We need to finish dealing with that bloody woman.”

“You don’t have to see her again,” Tarrant said. “Cally and I will handle it.” 

“Don’t try to coddle me,“ Avon said, more sharply. “It was unpleasant. It wasn’t traumatic.” 

Traumatic was exactly what Tarrant suspected Avon had found it but he didn’t argue. 

Cally was still asking questions when they got back. Tarrant suggested that they watch it on camera but Avon was insistent that they should join Cally. He saw Austlan cringe away slightly as Avon came in. She had her arm in a sling and was bleeding in several places; she hadn’t yet been near the med unit. They could have healed her injuries before the interrogation, Tarrant thought, but that wasn’t the way they were doing things, not today. He found himself glad that Blake had had nothing to do with this. 

After a couple of minutes he’d stopped thinking about what they’d done. They were getting their answers, and it seemed that they were answers worth the price. They’d missed the earlier part of the interrogation so not everything made sense, but he was picking up the general idea. 

The babies in the capsules were indeed clones. There had been two hundred of them launched in total, not just the thirty that they’d picked up. And they were clones, not of Republican citizens, but of the Republic’s more prominent enemies. DNA had been collected over years from handshakes at conferences, from hotel rooms, in sexual encounters, at bars and restaurants, by stealing medical samples and breaking into residences. Many clones were being kept on Earth, but the two hundred sent to IndSys were intended as tiny hostages, IndSys’s own offspring, weaponised against them.

“Many of the adults won’t care,“ Austlan said. “They’ll have no problem with letting their clone babies die. Our psych teams say that enough will feel an emotional pull, however, to cause havoc in the Systems when they find out about them. It won’t win us the war but it will give us some leverage when that war starts. And of course with all the DNA on file we can repeat the exercise whenever we like.” 

“Whose DNA was stolen?” Tarrant asked. “You must have seen a list.”

“Of course I have.” She smiled at him, a little lopsided given her swollen mouth. “I imagine what you really want to know is whether we have made you your own sweet little clone baby, Commander Tarrant?”

Tarrant hadn’t even considered that. He wasn’t an IndSys leader. He was just a pilot. “Have you?”

“Yes,” she said. “You, Roj Blake and your nasty thug of a boyfriend here. All three of you have tiny clone infants floating out in space right now. Congratulations, Commander. You’re a father.”


	5. Chapter 5

"If you don't at least get the bones set you could lose significant function."

With a slight effort Tarrant looked directly at Austlan's hand, resting swollen and twisted on the table.

She glanced at it then up to him. "It's evidence of your crimes," she said. "I'm not going to let you erase that."

"When it comes to crimes, the murder of 200 infants is going to rate more highly that a couple of fractured bones." Tarrant said.

"They can all be saved if IndSys co operates."

She didn't have any of the flight path data. It had been clear to her early on that it would only take one leak of that, though divided loyalties, or ethical doubts, "or being tortured while kidnapped, of course," she'd said, and the entire project failed.

They'd used a computer to calculate and control each capsule launch. It then generated a further 14 sets of almost identical launch data, mixed up all fifteen beyond hope of untangling and sent one set to each of 15 people, the names of whom she had carefully not been told. It had repeated the process for each launch. After all the launches had been complete its data banks had been scrapped. Fifteen people across the Republic now each held a different set of data on all 200 capsules but for each of them most of that data was junk. 

"If IndSys co-operate, we'll send them all fifteen sets and they can check all of them. They have plenty of ships and scanners available; it won't take them long. But if you wanted to rescue them for yourselves you'd have to track down all the holders of the data sets and make them hand them over. There's no point in hurting me any further- I genuinely have no idea who or where they are."

 

"Have you decided what you're going to do with me?"

"We have other priorities right now." Tarrant glanced around the sparsely furnished room. "If there's anything else you need, ask."

"I have young children," Austlan said. "My partner will be frantic with distress. You could let them know I'm alive."

"Sorry," Tarrant said, with genuine regret. "The Republic and IndSys are on the brink of war. We're not going to provide the final spark by confirming that we've kidnapped a Sub Commander from inside the Solar System itself."

"Then there's nothing else I want from you. Certainly not these." She pushed the painkillers back towards Tarrant with her good hand. "I'm not going to salve your conscience for you."

"I'm feeling less conscientious every time you refuse help," Tarrant said a little snappily. "What you went through was rough, but if you insist on staying in unnecessary pain now that's not Avon's doing."

She watched him for a moment. "I worked for Roj Blake for a while."

"I remember," Tarrant said. "You were in the diplomatic service."

"He wouldn't have done that." She nodded at her hand. "Are you sure you've made the right choice?"

"I can probably manage my personal life without your assistance. If you really want to help you can tell me where our children are."

"I can't,' she said. "And I'm glad of it."

 

"How is she?" Avon asked.

"Bad tempered. She won't take the painkillers either. I'm guessing it will be a hunger strike next."

"Don't sound so sorry for her," Cally said. "She's a war criminal."

"We're all war criminals," Avon said mildly.

"I'm not!"

"No, you are more sinned against than sinning, Cally." Avon agreed, "That's because you never took any of the power on offer. The rest of us have chosen to have the ability to make things happen. That's usually all it takes."

"You've spent fifty odd years not much troubled by conscience," Cally told him. "This is a poor time to discover a misplaced sense of empathy now. They had me under interrogation for days, Avon, and I wasn't responsible for atrocities. Don't expect me to go all dewy eyed about that child-killer because her hand still hurts."

"But she's not MIG," Tarrant pointed out. 

"It doesn't matter," Avon said. "Cally's right. She's playing us. Cally, see if Dayna's up yet. You two take Austlan to the med unit and make her use it. You might point out when you get there than the med unit treats malnutrition as well. There's nothing she can do to herself that we won't just fix."

Cally nodded, looking satisfied, and left.

"You're not happy about that," Avon said to Tarrant. 

"Haven't we done enough to her? Taking away what little physical autonomy she has seems unnecessarily cruel."

"You're trying to make up to her for what I did. You can't. All you're doing is letting her use what happened as continuing ammunition." Avon sighed, a little tiredly. "I would guess that at some point we're going to need more information about her project that she won't want to give us. Don't let her convince you that we owe her humane treatment, Del. We can't afford it."

It hadn't occurred to Tarrant that they might have to go through the whole thing again. The thought made him feel physically sick. 

He wished he could talk to Blake, but they'd received a message from him shortly before they went after Austlan saying that he was joining a fast clipper with an IndSys delegation to Earth. Liberator expected to rendezvous with her in three days’ time but in the meantime communications would not be secure and they'd decided not to give away their position by trying to talk to him en route.

Avon came over and brushed Tarrant's face with an unusually gentle hand. "We're not going to solve any of our problems here tonight. I owe you an orgasm and you owe me an explanation of a certain statement. Come to bed." 

 

"So the sex is great." Avon said. "Where's your evidence that this is about anything else?"

Tarrant was lying on his back in the dark, hands behind his head and his thigh close up against Avon's. The sex had indeed just been great, but that wasn't the point.

"You could give me credit for knowing how I feel."

"You didn't know yesterday," Avon pointed out. "I don't trust revelations, particularly ones that miraculously materialise under high stress."

"So how do I persuade you?" Tarrant said in some frustration.

"Do you have to? Does it make any difference whether I believe you or not?"

"I think it's vital, if we’re going to figure out our future."

"Our future? Aren’t you forgetting someone?"

"Not for a moment. We’ll just have to sort out something between us."

Avon snorted a little. "Because you must always have everything that you want. I notice you haven’t asked me if I’m similarly enamoured?"

"If you want to tell me you will. I’m not going to push the issue."

"You are going to take my involvement in your plans for granted, however."

"You can always say no," Tarrant said. 

"And what am I saying no to in particular?"

Tarrant took a breath. "I’d like to marry you."

He could feel Avon tense against him. "Haven’t we been through all this?"

"Not Blake. Just me."

"That’s... unusual," Avon said. "Legally you’d need his consent, assuming you weren’t planning to divorce him."

"Of course I’m not going to divorce him," Tarrant said. "And yes, I think he’ll consent."

There was a pause. "In law there’s no such thing as a subordinate marriage," Avon said. "You’d be just as married to me as you are to him. That’s quite a step up from casual sex."

"I know," Tarrant said. "I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t actually love you."

There was a silence so long that he though the man might have fallen asleep before Avon spoke again.

"Well, I suppose if it’s the only way to keep my pilot on board I may have to consider it. I’ll give you an answer after I’ve spoken to Blake."

 

"So what have I missed?" Blake let go of Tarrant and stepped off the teleport platform.

"Where to start?" Tarrant said. "Well we’ve got Austlan safely locked up on board, we know the Republic’s intention for the babies, which you’re not going to like at all, but we don’t yet have a plan to stop them. Earth is not screaming about its missing Sub Commander, which may be suggestive. And Avon would like a private conversation with you at your earliest convenience."

"So Austlan’s co-operating?"

"Under duress," Tarrant said. "I’d stay out of that if I were you."

"That bad?"

"We didn’t have much of a choice," Tarrant said. "There was too much at stake to be nice. Really, Roj, please don’t get involved. She’ll just try to play you off against us."

"Very well," Blake said rather reluctantly. "What do you intend to do with her?"

"Right now, hold onto her. She’s our main source of information about what’s going on out there. In the long term, hand her over to IndSys I guess for a criminal trial."

"All right," Blake said. "And Avon’s private conversation?"

"I asked him to marry me," Tarrant said. "He hasn’t yet said no."

"You have been busy!" Blake said. "I’ve been out of touch for all of five days and now my husband’s getting married!"

"The whole duress thing was bad," Tarrant said. "I think we both got a little emotional."

"But you really do want to marry him?"

"Yes. We can work it all out somehow, can’t we, Roj?" He realised to his embarrassment that his voice was almost pleading.

"I imagine that we can," Blake said comfortingly. "I’ll talk to him as soon as I’ve caught up on everything else."

 

"How long do we have you for?" Dayna asked. They were all gathered on the flight deck to fill Blake in on developments,

"Permanently," Blake said. "I left a letter of resignation in my cabin when I teleported. Vila’s going to pack up our belongings on Frais and bring them on board next time the Liberator’s passing. I’m part of the crew now."

Tarrant glanced at Avon’s impassive face. "That's not news to you."

"I needed a full-time pilot for when Dayna's gone. I couldn't have you planet-bound half the time."

"But how did you persuade Blake?" Tarrant turned back to his husband. "You were set against it last time we spoke." 

"There was a negotiation involved," Blake said. 

"Ohhh! So that was your price for staying on Earth to capture Austlan," Tarrant said to Avon. "Keeping me on Liberator. And I didn't get consulted."

"You can always say no," Avon said with a small smile. "If you really don't want him here."

"Damn you," Tarrant said. "Of course I want him here, but not because you've twisted his arm."

"He isn't that brilliant a negotiator," Blake said. "Here is just fine. It'll all work out, Del. Don't fret."

"It had better," Tarrant muttered. "Right. Onto to the serious stuff. The Republic has been collecting DNA samples from its political opponents for several years. It has also been developing a cloning programme. Two weeks ago it launched 200 capsules from outside Pluto orbit, each one containing, in suspended animation, a full gestation unborn infant cloned from the DNA of, mostly an IndSys political or military leader or leading cultural figure. We have recovered 30 of these capsules."

He paused. "Go on," Blake said, unsmiling.

"All right. So far we have a list of 43 individuals who were cloned, Austlan wasn't responsible for selecting targets and she claims these are all the names she remembers on the list." 

"She might be induced to remember some more if the identities become critical." Avon's voice was cold. 

Tarrant glanced at him then took up the narration again. "The intention was -is- to reveal the identity of these clones as they reach their target systems in approximately ten days’ time, and to offer help in recovering them in exchange for some critical military withdrawals. This will be presented as an attempt to reduce military tensions and avoid war. It will of course be a precursor to an all out attack."

"Well." Blake said. "That's pretty grim. Anything else I need to know?"

"Oh yes," Tarrant said. "I hadn't got to the best bit yet. We're on the list. You, me and Avon."

He'd expected Blake to be shocked. He hadn't expected him to stagger backwards, trip and half fall backwards into the chair behind him. 

"They've cloned me again?"

"It's not like last time," Cally said urgently. "It's just an ordinary baby which happens to share your DNA, that's all. A baby, Blake. It's not a weapon. It's isn't ever going to replace you."

Shit. If Tarrant had thought for a moment, he'd have been less gung ho about the announcement. He'd known about the clone they'd made of Blake but it had been ancient history, before he joined Liberator. 

"Right." Blake seemed to rally a bit. "You're sure?"

"I know cloning technologies. This is basic." Cally said. "All they've done is create a child with one genetic parent instead of two. There's nothing inherently terrible about it."

"Except that in this case they've used stolen genetic material," Avon said. "None of us has consented to be used to create a human being like this." 

"That's not their fault though," Dayna protested. "No one has any choice about being born."

"They aren't born," Avon said. "They aren't bouncing babies waving their fists around and cooing. They are still in the womb and in suspended animation. No heart-beat, no brain activity, no cell division. We wouldn't be killing then, just refusing to revive their corpses."

"But we could just wake them up instead and look after them!" Dayna insisted. "We don't need to harm them. Just because their parent doesn't want them doesn't mean that nobody does."

"It's irrelevant who might want it. I will not tolerate any actions that cause a child created from my stolen DNA to be born. If I have any moral obligation to my non-existent offspring it can only be to spare it the burden of being an exact copy of myself. Even Blake must grasp that much ethics."

Tarrant realised that they'd been putting off this argument until Blake arrived. Even after all these years he was still their moral arbiter. 

"Hang on," he said. "Blake's only just found out about this. Give him a chance to think about it before you try to enlist him on your side."

"I'd like to know what everyone thinks." Blake said. "Cally?"

She shrugged. "They aren't my clones. On Auron we treated prenatals with respect but if something went wrong with a batch we wouldn't bring them to term. But there was never a case where the genetic parent didn't want them, to my knowledge."

"Del?"

Tarrant sighed. "I wish they didn't exist. Avon's right. If I was going to choose to have a child I'd want to give it a hell of a lot better start in life than as an illegal and unwanted clone stuck with all my faults. Letting these capsules sail away undiscovered is probably best for them and us."

He managed a grimace at Blake.

"But don't ask me to be the one to turn the life support off. It still feels like a child. I don't think I could do it."

Blake nodded. "It doesn't so much matter who I think is right." he said. "What matters is that if we can't agree then the other hundred and ninety-seven targets won't either. The problem is not just finding the capsules, it's reaching an acceptable decision about what to do with them that doesn't tear IndSys apart, when every significant community figure has an extremely personal stake in the matter. I imagine the Republic knows that. From what I remember of Austlan she wasn't stupid."

Avon's eyes narrowed. "If that's their intention, they won't hold out for impossible concessions before handing over the flight data. I think Austlan may have been misleading us."

"Maybe I should talk to her," Blake suggested. "We do go back some way, after all. I know Tarrant's not keen on the idea but I'm really not that easily manipulated."

He looked around at the silent faces. "Am I missing something?"

"Your husband is trying to protect you," Avon said. "If you question her you become complicit in her treatment here."

"Which wasn't that bad, surely?"

"Not as such things go," Avon said. "We're not professional torturers after all. But we did hurt her until she talked, and we made it clear that we would start again if she stopped."

Blake said nothing for a moment. Then he stood up from the chair than he'd collapsed into earlier.

"I'm part of your crew now, Avon. I'll talk to her. I'd better take a look at the recordings of her interrogation first."

"You and I can have coffee in the viewing room and I'll talk you through the highlights, if you can call them that," Avon said. "We might as well also discuss the other outstanding matter while we're there."

 

In desperation Tarrant had finally tried passing the other flyer at angle steeper than any reasonable pilot would dream of trying and it had worked. He accelerated down the middle of the canyon, alert for the next obstacle. 

"Del?” came from behind him.

"Save and off" he said to the simulation. It had distracted him from the waiting, but now that his senses were free again he felt a bundle of nerves.

"Well?" he said to his husband. "What did he say?"

"I think he should tell you that," Blake said. He looked sober, but he'd been watching the interrogations, Tarrant thought. They walked to the viewing room and Blake stopped outside. "I'll be back in our rooms. I'll see you both there when you're ready."

Tarrant walked into the room and closed the door behind him. He couldn't remember ever feeling as nervous about a conversation. 

"Did you crash it again?" Avon asked.

"Nope. Passed the bloody thing at last. Never mind that. Talk to me, Avon. Have you made a decision?" 

"You haven't changed your mind about asking?"

"Of course not," Tarrant said, trying not to sound too impatient. "I want to marry you, if you'll agree."

"Given the circumstances I have a few conditions," Avon said. 

That sounded like a yes. Tarrant's heart lifted. "Go on."

"Firstly we reach an agreement about sleeping arrangements with Blake before this goes any further. If I'm your husband I expect your company, if nothing else, on some more reliable basis than your whims."

That sounded fair. He nodded.

"Secondly, he and I are not getting involved. I will have a policy of strict non-involvement in your marriage with him and he has agreed to do the same. How you make this work, assuming you can, is your problem not ours."

"I'm not sure how realistic that is," Tarrant said. 

"You'll have to make it realistic. You're the one who has decided that he wants to have everything. Blake's giving up half his marriage to keep you happy. Don't expect either of us to keep dancing round each other to make life easier for you."

“It’s a good job I wasn’t expecting a romantic acceptance speech,” Tarrant said. “Is there anything else?”

“I accept Blake’s prior claim on all your jointly held assets,” Avon said. “Liberator and Orac are mine and they are going to stay that way.”

Tarrant felt a very slight stab of disappointment. Apparently he’d been vaguely hoping that Avon would feel generous. It hadn’t been likely.

“All right,” he said. “If that’s everything, all we need to do is decide when and where we want to get married.”

Avon looked rather startled. “We don’t need a ceremony,” he said. “We just need to fill in the paperwork.”

“We don’t need a ceremony,” Tarrant agreed. “But if we want the press off our tail a few videos of us all in shiny clothes smiling at each other might help. If we just wave a certificate at them they’ll presume it’s a sham.”

“I’m not marrying you for good publicity,” Avon said sharply.

“Of course you aren’t. But it would be stupid not to take the opportunity to get some in the process. I know Liberator’s technically independent but having IndSys’s goodwill is useful for all sorts of things.”

“All right,” Avon said. “I’ll offer you a compromise. We talk to Blake and complete the legal elements today. You can have your ceremony, and even a luxury honeymoon, when things calm down a bit.”

“It’s a deal,” Tarrant said. He couldn’t quite get over his sense of disbelief that this was really going to happen. “Blake’s waiting for us in our rooms.” 

“Congratulations.” Blake came forward to kiss Tarrant and, rather more formally, Avon, who tolerated it. “Come and sit down. I gather that we have some logistics to arrange.”

It didn’t turn out to be as simple as dividing Tarrant’s time between the two men. The rooms he shared with Blake had been his first or second home for twenty-five years. Avon’s quarters had been his own for even longer than that, and Tarrant had never been anything but a visitor there.

“He’s still going to be nothing but a visitor for as long as he lives with you.” Avon said to Blake.

“I agreed to your marriage,” Blake said, getting a little heated. “Not to have my husband move out completely. It’s bad enough that he’s not going to be around for half the time; I’m not prepared to lose him for the rest of it.”

“I’m not moving out,” Tarrant said. “Avon. You said you weren’t going to interfere between me and Blake- well, telling me I can’t live with him is definite interference. You’re just going to accept that I’ve been married to Blake for a very long time. I’ll give you equal time and equal affection but I won’t detach myself from the life we’ve built together because it makes you feel like an outsider.”

Avon said something inaudible and stalked out.

“It was never going to be easy,” Blake said. “Has he told you that he loves you yet?”

“Of course not,” Tarrant said. “I’m not even sure that he does. He’s got enough other reasons to want me around.”

“And you’ll marry him even though you aren’t sure.”

“Yes.” He smiled a little ruefully at Blake. “I need him. I need both of you. It’s selfish and greedy but I do.”

“That’s not how I see it,” Blake said. “I’m happy for you both. But I won’t be pushed around by him, not about you.”

“And so you shouldn’t,” Tarrant said. “I’d better go and fetch him back, I suppose.”

As he got to his feet Avon was already coming back in.

“You’re right” the man said to Blake, sounding less disgruntled. “Where he stays is his business, not mine. But if he wants a second marriage, he’ll have to have a second household. I’m not having him dashing back to you every time he needs a clean shirt.”

“Tarrant?” Blake asked.

“Fine by me,” Tarrant said. “Though if I’m moving into Avon’s quarters I want a say in redecorating them.“

“They don’t need redecorating.”

“Oh yes they do!” Tarrant insisted.

“That,” Blake said, “is most definitely not any of my business, thankfully.”

They settled in the end on a general rule of a week with each husband, with flexibility when appropriate. Tarrant had suggested a turnover of just couple of days but Avon had, not particularly tactfully, told him that since both his partners would doubtless want to have sex with him every time he reappeared in their beds he’d end up too exhausted to pilot Avon’s ship. “Give it a week,” he’d said, “and we might get bored enough for you to get some sleep.”

“Is that it then?” Tarrant asked. He was still somewhat stunned at the speed at which it was happening.

“Just the formal stuff to do.” Avon said. “Give me half an hour to get all the documents ready, Del. We need an independent witness; either Cally or Dayna will do.”

He frowned slightly at Tarrant. “Then we’ll have to get back to dealing with Austlan. This has taken up enough time already.”

 

It was done. The marriage of Kerr Avon and Del Tarrant-Blake, both currently resident on the independent ship Liberator, duly affirmed by current spouse Roj Blake-Tarrant and witnessed by Dayna Mellanby, both also of the Liberator, non-standard asset apportionment statements attached, all registered with IndSys’s central registry and, because they saw no reason not to, the Republic’s registry as well.

“What’s the betting that no-one will notice?” Tarrant said.

Avon shrugged. “Any decent news service would have alerts on our names.”

“Not in the marriage registry, surely?” Blake argued.

“A decent news service would have them everywhere. Anyway, we’ll no doubt find out soon enough. I have alerts on them, even if they don’t on us.”

Tarrant said nothing. It was slowly dawning on him how much, and for how long, he’d feared losing Avon. He felt overwhelmingly light-hearted. It was actually going to work. More than that; it had worked. 

“Austlan,” Blake said reluctantly. “We can’t put this off forever.”

“Do you want me to come in with you?” Tarrant asked.

“Not yet. If you monitor the feed I’ll tell you if I need you.”

The woman looked startled when Blake walked in.

"I didn't expect you to get mixed up with this," she said. "I thought you had principles."

"Did you, Lente?" Blake sat down opposite her. "Then you didn't learn much from working with me. I led a revolution. I was president of the Republic for ten years. I went to prison for kidnapping the woman behind the assassination attempt that killed my people. There are things that I believe need to happen for the sake of people's freedom and I'll do what's necessary to bring them about."

He rested a elbow on the table between them. No gun, Tarrant realised. "Is that how you feel about what you've been doing, or are you just following orders?"

"I'm loyal," she hissed at him. "Something you've never been."

"Possibly not," he agreed." Loyalty to one's superiors requires a certain suspension of independent judgement. I've never managed that."

"So you think the end justifies the means," she said. "So do I. You should never have encouraged the Republic to splinter. Everyone, Earth and systems, has lost out. There will inevitably be war, and Earth has to win it, or IndSys will strip us of all Earth's resources and leave us to starve."

"You believe that?" Blake sounded a little incredulous. 

"They hate us," she said. "Why would they show mercy? And you work for them. You're a traitor to the greater part of humanity, Roj Blake, all those on Earth."

Blake leaned back in his chair. "You're a mother now, I understand. How do you feel about the babies in the capsules?"

"They aren't on my conscience," she said. "The clones weren't created to become people; they exist for one purpose only, and whether they expire or get rescued they've fulfilled that purpose. The project protocol required that at no point should they suffer pain or discomfort and I've made sure that they never did. Are you going to call me a child murderer now, like your husband and his friends did?"

"Do you feel like one?"

"No."

"Then what would be the point?" Blake asked mildly.

"I have to admit that he's rather good at this." A hand rested on Tarrant's shoulder. He looked round to see Avon intent on the screen. 

"They claimed that it justified their treatment of me." Austlan sounded bitter. "The man who's screwing your husband is a sadistic monster."

"Avon also believes that the end justifies the means." Blake said. "I'm sorry if you feel you've been mistreated under false pretences. Let me try to clarify, without hypocrisy."

He sat forward again, his voice a little more intense, 

"Creating potential human beings out of stolen DNA without any regard to their likely fates is morally and legally a terrible thing to do. Using them to blackmail their biological parents is even more ethically objectionable. However it's not my task to sit in judgement on what you've done.

"My concern is with the likely effect on IndSys if this project continues, including the possibility of war or civil breakdown. Either of those had the potential to cause a great deal more human suffering than the termination of two hundred clones already in suspended animation, or indeed the life of one heavily compromised Sub Commander.

“The Republic hasn't demanded your return, either publicly or privately. Their idea of what constitutes loyalty only goes one way.”

“I’m willing to die for the Republic,” she said.

“Are you indeed?” Blake said. “That’s interesting. Hold that thought. I’ll be back later.”

 

“Your husband’s an idiot,” Blake said cheerfully to Tarrant. “And you are too. You were so busy worrying about the enormity of what you were doing that you didn’t stop to wonder how plausible her reaction was.

“You heard her in there. She’ll die for the Republic, and she means it. She didn’t break and spill all their secrets just because you kicked her, Avon.”

“Fuck.” Tarrant was staring at the screen. “You’re right.” The cowed and aggrieved woman they’d been dealing with had disappeared under a bit of Blake’s prodding. 

“All right,” Avon said darkly. “Next time I’ll make certain that she’s telling the truth.”

“And how will you be sure?” Blake said. “She’s got lies prepared and you can’t verify them.”

“We’ll have to work out whether anything she told us can be independently verified,” Tarrant said. “At least she didn’t know about the capsules we found.”

“I imagine she knew,” Cally said. “The questions we asked revealed what we already knew. That’s how interrogations work. 

“So,” Avon said. “She’s told us what she thinks we know already and a whole load of other things which may or may not be true. Beating her up again might not be the best way of getting to the truth but right now it would feel quite satisfying.”

 

“What if they aren’t clones?” Avon said

They were sitting around the rec room table, throwing out ideas. Tarrant shook his head. “We’d already got information about the cloning programme.”

“Had we?” Avon said. “Think about it. Cally, how difficult was it to find out about the Republic’s top secret cloning programme?”

“Not as difficult as it might have been, I suppose,” Cally said. “There was a trail; we followed it.”

“And how much of that trail was detail?”

“Hardly anything,” she said. “We found out very little except Austlan’s name. There was the message from last year, though.”

“Could that have been deliberate misinformation?”

“It could,” she said. 

“But if they aren’t clones, who are their parents?” Dayna asked

“They could be anyone.” Avon said. “Earth fertility clinics destroy thousands of spare embryos each year. Acquiring a couple of hundred and gestating them artificially is a great deal easier than a mass programme of stealing DNA from your enemies and developing cloning technology.” 

“That’s assuming there are two hundred,” Tarrant added. “That’s Austlan’s figure, so suspect. Do you really think they aren’t clones?”

“Think of all the things they could have done with clones of their enemies. They’ve picked a bizarre and complicated scheme that just happens to involve putting those supposed clones beyond anyone’s capacity to confirm their identity. That’s not coincidence, surely.” 

“But IndSys will want evidence.” Dayna said.

“I’m sure they’ve got DNA on some of us. Blake and Tarrant no doubt left theirs liberally all over the Capital, for a start. They provide some DNA records, they prove that there are babies in capsules- we’ll help them there, obviously- they state that they are clones and patsies that we are, we dutifully confirm it from Austlan’s interrogation. Not one bit of this requires any actual cloning.” Avon looked thoroughly satisfied with his deduction.

“We should take one of them out of suspended animation and take a DNA sample,” Tarrant suggested. “Cally. Could you identify a clone from that?”

“Only if you had the parent’s DNA,” she said. “Otherwise they appear exactly like anyone else.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Blake said with sudden enthusiasm. They all looked at him.

“It doesn’t,” he insisted. “Avon’s just explained very clearly how the attack on IndSys works if they think the babies are clones, whether they are or not. That works both ways.”

He looked round at blank faces.

“Look, it’s simple. If IndSys knows they aren’t clones, the attack won’t work. They just become poor maltreated Earth orphans being weaponised against us. No real ethical arguments, no conflict. But that’s just as true whether they really are clones or not- as long as IndSys are convinced that they aren’t.”

“So we lie,” Avon said.

“Through our teeth,” Blake said. “We say that Austlan has confessed that there never was a cloning programme and we’ve tested the babies on Liberator who are perfectly normal with DNA from two parents. The chances are that’s the truth anyway but that’s not what matters. What matters is that IndSys gets through this intact.”

“And if they turn out to be clones after all?” Tarrant asked.

“Then we’re in trouble but IndSys survives. It’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

There was a pause while everyone thought about that.

“What will happen to the ones out there?” Dayna asked.

“I imagine that IndSys will generously offer to recover the Republic’s misplaced infants once the flight data is provided. We’ve got time to spark off a major propaganda campaign on Earth; the pressure on the military will be considerable. Hopefully they will provide the data.” Blake said. 

“And if they don’t?” she asked

“Then I’m afraid that the capsules will never be recovered. I’m sorry, Dayna, but IndSys can’t be blackmailed by the Republic threatening atrocities.”

“It could be my child out there,” Tarrant said bleakly.

“Yes,” Blake said. “It could. And if we do this you won’t be able to do anything at all about it. If it’s any help, I don’t think it is.” 

There was another long silence.

“All right,” Tarrant said. “I’m in.” He could see the others nodding.

 

“I think you ought to see this.”

Tarrant turned on the screen in Austlan’s room. “It’s going out right now on unblockable frequencies to both the Republic and IndSys. We calculate coverage of about 60% of the Republican population and 70% of IndSys.”

He came round and sat beside her on the sofa, facing the screen. “There’s always a solution to every problem. This is ours.”

She watched in impassive silence as Blake outlined the scheme. There was video of them recovering a capsule and high definition scans of the contents, then a shot of capsule after capsule lined up in the hold.

Her face filled the screen. “This is Lente Austlan,” Blake’s voiceover went. “She’s the Republican Sub Commander in charge of sending defenceless Earth babies into space. For the last five days she’s been our unwilling guest on Liberator and has been answering some of our questions.”

They’d spent many hours questioning her. It hadn’t been difficult for Orac to seamlessly stitch together snippets from her replies to say exactly what they chose for her to say. They’d recorded some more appropriate questions and added those as well. 

Tarrant could feel her tense next to him as her slightly battered image on the screen reluctantly revealed the clone hoax. “This is shameful and dishonest.”

“Did you expect us to play fair? You didn’t.”

On the screen Avon was running through the tests they’d carried out on the babies, with just too little detail for anyone to be able to debunk them. A succession of authoritative-looking genetic codes flashed up on the screen. 

Back to Blake, summing up. There had never been any clones, just an attempt at a vicious deception. Even though it had failed utterly the capsules were out there, flying towards their chosen destinations, their pitiful contents destined to die unless the Republic revealed the flight codes. Liberator and IndSys were standing by to rescue them, waiting for Earth to do the right thing by its own children. 

“It’s over, Lente,” Tarrant said. “The hoax and your career. All that’s left is to determine whether the babies can be rescued, and whether you’re going to stand trial.”

“You’re suggesting that those two are linked?”

“If they all come through unharmed we might be able to resist the pressure for your arrest. This is Liberator; we are rather good at playing outside the rules. But if they die out there- well, there’s nothing anyone can do for you, and we’d have no reason to even try.”

“How do I know you’ve really broadcast this?”

“We’ll let you see the reactions as they come in.”

She was still staring at the screen. “They really are clones, you know. And yours is out there somewhere. If I do ever come to trial I intend to make it clear that your lies killed two hundred people’s children including your own son.”

 

“You’re not in the mood,” Avon said

Tarrant lay still in the darkness of Avon’s room. Their room, now, he supposed.

“Sorry,” he said. “I just can’t be sure that we’ve done the right thing.” 

“You’re worried that your clone might die,” Avon said. “I’m facing the possibility that mine might live. It’s done now, Del, for better or worse. There’s no point in fretting.” 

“That’s twice today,” Tarrant said. “I like it.”

“Like what?”

“You calling me Del.” 

“From the distraught to the ridiculous,” Avon said. “You’re a butterfly of emotions, you know.” An arm was warm around his shoulders. “Go to sleep. There are plenty of other nights to come.”

 

Alishia hiccupped, looked disgruntled, threw up a little and started to cry. Tarrant hurriedly passed her back to her father and wiped the small mess off his extremely expensive suit.

She was a pretty baby, with dark golden skin and deep brown eyes. He wondered what she'd grow up to look like.

"I wish you wouldn't look at her like that," Dayna came up beside him. Alishia's little brother was propped up in her arm. He had the unfocused frown of the very young. Dayna and Frech hadn't agreed on his name yet.

"I was just admiring her." Tarrant said. "She's gorgeous."

"She's our daughter," Dayna said firmly.

Things had not gone entirely to plan. The laboratories where the embryos had been gestated and the capsules manufactured had been destroyed in explosions a few hours after Earth got Blake's message. The Republic had flatly denied all knowledge of the project and continued to deny it. No flight data had ever been provided to IndSys and eventually the capsules had to be assumed lost permanently. 

This had left the thirty in Liberator's hold. A consultation with a couple of senior IndSys officials had rapidly reached a consensus. The babies had been unfrozen, given expert medical care throughout their births, and distributed with false documentation to different adoption agencies across the systems. Everything that might carry a trace of their DNA had been systematically destroyed. With the exception of Alishia, not one of them was now traceable and only Liberator’s crew knew where Dayna’s adopted daughter had come from. 

Austlan had continued to insist that the babies had been clones. It was agreed that a public trial wasn't in the public interest; an IndSys military tribunal had sentenced her to indefinite detention. The various crew members of Liberator had undertaken to visit her regularly to ensure her conditions were acceptable. Tarrant wasn't looking forward to his turn, but it was just one more thing that stank about the whole thing.

Alishia was gigging now, bounced up and down by Frech. If she was a clone they'd almost certainly never know. Tarrant had agreed to all of this but he still lay awake some nights, wondering. 

“Come on, you lot! Everyone’s waiting!” That was Vila, resplendent in green. Apparently no-one had told him about not outdressing the grooms. 

Tarrant waved the others in, then paused at the doorway of the great hall.

“Not getting cold feet?” Vila asked.

“I haven’t seen that many camera drones since they let Blake out of prison,” There were people as well, hundreds of them. How on earth had the plans for their little ceremony turned into this?

“Everyone’s fascinated,” Vila said. “They want to know if your husbands are going to fight over you.”

“They fight over pretty much everything else,” Tarrant said. “But not me.” He started down the long aisle, trying not to look too embarrassed. 

“Here,” Blake stepped out from behind a row of steps and took his arm.

“What are you doing?” Tarrant slowed down to match Blake’s steady tread.

“Giving you away. It’s an old Earth tradition.” 

“You’re not giving me away. You’re sharing.” 

“True, but there isn’t a tradition for that.”

Tarrant could see Avon now, waiting next to the celebrant. He looked stiff and somewhat nervous. 

“Try not to make too much of a scene,” Tarrant muttered to Blake as they walked up to him.

“It’s your wedding,” Blake said. “This is my bit done.” He stepped back leaving Tarrant next to a frozen Avon. Tarrant glanced back to see him taking a seat in the front row.

There was a ceremony. Tarrant remembered all the bits he was meant to say, and as far as he could tell Avon did the same. He’d married Blake on Liberator, with three friends as witnesses; it had been warm and funny. This was more like his criminal trial. A stupid idea and he was sure that Avon was standing there blaming him for it all.

“You may kiss your spouse,” the celebrant intoned. Tarrant had to suppress his first instinct to turn to Blake. Avon brushed his lips against Tarrant’s and stepped away.

This was not going to play well to the media. Tarrant came forward to whisper in Avon’s ear. “Kiss me properly and I’ll make it worth your while later.”

“You think I’m susceptible to bribery?” Avon said, not quite so quietly.

“I hope so. It’s all I’ve got. A real kiss for the cameras and you get half an hour  
of whatever you like before the reception starts.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Avon glanced around at the slightly unsettled crowd, then wrapped his hands around the back of Tarrant’s head and kissed him with a great deal of vigour. There was a rustle of approval among the audience. 

 

“Excuse me,” Avon said to the crowd of guests who had come up to congratulate them. “We’ll be back shortly. Have you tried the champagne?”

His hand was tightly in Tarrant’s. Tarrant could tell that people thought it romantic. He was pretty sure it was merely making sure that he couldn’t slip away.

Avon ducked behind the dais. “Our room’s this way.” He tugged Tarrant along the corridors.

“I’m coming,” Tarrant said. “We don’t actually have to run, you know.”

“Here.” Avon waved the key at the door. The suite was huge, with drinks, alcoholic and soft, set out next to the enormous bed.

“Thirty minutes from now,” Avon said. “And whatever I like.”

“You always get that anyway,” Tarrant said. “Though I have to say I’m intrigued about what you’re going to ask for.”

“A proper back rub,” Avon said. “This bloody suit has done horrible things to my shoulder blades. Thirty minutes should be just about right.”

 

“I’m sorry that it was so awful.” Tarrant smoothed his oiled hands once more over Avon’s naked back. “I didn’t know it was going to be like that.” 

Avon shrugged, muscles moving under his hands. “We only did it for the cameras. I’ll go back out there, dance with you, dance once or twice with your other husband for appearances, I suppose, be nice to people and I may get a little drunk even if you don’t. And then we’ll disappear for a week.” 

He let a deep sigh out. “My back feels better now, and we still have five minutes.”

“Not even you can manage sex in five minutes,” Tarrant said reluctantly. He’d been hard almost since he started touching Avon.

“We can certainly start to have sex in five minutes,” Avon rolled over and smiled up at Tarrant. “Who says that we need to stop?” 

They were disgracefully late for their own wedding reception. Fortunately, the  
food and drink had been available even when they weren’t, so nobody seemed to mind much. 

 

“Thank you,” Tarrant said sincerely to Blake. He and Avon were preparing to leave in the racer. Avon hadn’t told him where they were going yet. “For absolutely everything.” He hugged his husband tightly. “I’ll be back soon.”

“Seven days,” Blake said cheerfully. “Have fun and don’t let him make you late.” He kissed Tarrant a little more warmly than was entirely decent in public. 

Avon coughed, rather loudly, behind Tarrant’s head. 

“Are we going?” he asked rather dryly when he had Tarrant’s attention. “Or are you going to stay here and canoodle?”

“I’m coming,” Tarrant said, and to Blake, “Seven days. Love you.”

“Love you too,” Blake watched them get into the tiny ship. “I’ll send you the best bits of the media coverage to watch,” he called as the door closed. “In case you run out of things to do.”

“Send us what you like,” Avon called back. “Just take care of my ship,” 

The racer pulled away. “I’m still not sure that I should trust him with Liberator,” Avon muttered. “It comes to something when I’m relying on Vila to keep him honest.”

“She’ll be there when we get back, and without a scratch on her,” Tarrant said. “I will personally vouch for the integrity of both my husbands.”

Avon looked startled at that. “That’s not wise,” he said.

“It’s all right. I was joking.” Tarrant grinned at his husband’s vexed expression. “Now, how about telling me where I’m flying this thing to?”

 

THE END


End file.
